Mark Zuckerberg

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pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

I’m very glad to be in Beijing: Vindu Goel, Austin Ramzy, and Paul Mozur, “Mark Zuckerberg, Speaking Mandarin, Tries to Win Over China for Facebook,” New York Times, October 23, 2014. he even asked China’s president Xi: Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith, “China’s President Xi Jinping ‘Turns Down Mark Zuckerberg’s Request to Name His Unborn Child’ at White House Dinner,” Independent, October 4, 2015. chose their own Chinese name for Maxima: Mark Zuckerberg announced it in the “Happy New Year!” video on Facebook in 2016. “Every year this trip”: Mark Zuckerberg posted his trip at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, on Facebook on October 28, 2017.

“Several days ago”: VP & Deputy General Counsel of Facebook Paul Grewal, “Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook,” Facebook Newsroom, March 16, 2018. “I think the feedback”: Nicholas Thompson, “Mark Zuckerberg Talks to WIRED About Facebook’s Privacy Problem,” Wired, March 21, 2018. scrutinizing his non-hoodie apparel: Vanessa Friedman, “Mark Zuckerberg’s I’m Sorry Suit,” New York Times, April 10, 2018. “Facebook is an idealistic”: The statement, and the complete transcript of Zuckerberg’s hearing, is available at “Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate Hearing,” Washington Post, April 10, 2018. In front of him: Taylor Hatmaker, “Here Are Mark Zuckerberg’s Notes from Today’s Hearing,” TechCrunch, April 10, 2018. AP photographer Andrew Harnick had enterprisingly captured the notes when Zuckerberg left his seat and failed to cover his talking points.

Other useful accounts of early Mark Zuckerberg include two New Yorker profiles: Jose Antonio Vargas, “The Face of Facebook,” The New Yorker, September 13, 2010; and Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?” The New Yorker, September 10, 2018. Also, Lev Grossman, The Connector (TIME, 2010), ebook of Time magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year; and Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect. he did not object: Shaer, “The Zuckerbergs of Dobbs Ferry.” “My wife was a superwoman”: Ed Zuckerberg, WVOX radio interview. “Good Jewish mother”: Mark Zuckerberg at Y Combinator Startup School, 2011, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 76.


pages: 226 words: 69,893

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich

different worldview, Mark Zuckerberg, old-boy network, Peter Thiel, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, social web

Or maybe Mark had never really changed at all; maybe Eduardo had just misread him from the start. Like the Winklevoss twins, Eduardo had projected his own thoughts onto that blankness, drawing in the features he most wanted to see. Maybe he’d never really known Mark Zuckerberg. He wondered if, deep down, Mark Zuckerberg even knew himself. And Sean Parker? Sean Parker probably thought he knew Mark Zuckerberg, too. But Eduardo was pretty sure that was going to be a short-lived pairing as well. In Eduardo’s mind, Sean Parker was like a jittery little comet tearing through the atmosphere; he’d already burned through two startups. The question wasn’t if he’d burn through Facebook as well, it was when.

He hated being stalled, just watching as the rest of the world went by. Tyler shrugged. He didn’t want to get ahead of himself—but maybe they had read the kid wrong. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t the entrepreneur Tyler had thought he was. Maybe Zuckerberg was just another computer geek without any real vision. “If that happens,” Tyler glumly responded, “we have to find ourselves a new programmer. One that understands the big picture.” Maybe Mark Zuckerberg didn’t get it at all. Eduardo had been standing in the empty hallway in Kirkland House a good twenty minutes before Mark finally burst out of the stairwell that led down toward the dining hall; Mark was moving fast, his flip-flops a blur beneath his feet, the hood of his yellow fleece hoody flapping behind his head like a halo in a hurricane.

Every day, Tyler, Cameron, and Divya had to listen as classmates chatted on and on about thefacebook. And not just at Harvard; the damn thing was everywhere. In the dorm rooms down the hall, on the laptop in every bedroom. On the TV news, almost every week. In the newspapers, sometimes every morning. Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg. Mark fucking Zuckerberg. Okay, maybe Tyler was becoming a little obsessed. He knew from Mark’s point of view, he, Cameron, and Divya were just a blip in the history of thefacebook. In Mark’s mind, he had worked for a few hours for some jocky classmates, gotten bored, and moved on. There were no papers signed, no work agreements or nondisclosures or noncompetes.


pages: 372 words: 100,947

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

By the end of 2004, one million college students: Anne Sraders, “History of Facebook: Facts and What’s Happening,” TheStreet, October 11, 2018. 11. The board at the time: Allison Fass, “Peter Thiel Talks about the Day Mark Zuckerberg Turned down Yahoo’s $1 Billion,” Inc., March 12, 2013. 12. The investment and buyout offers kept coming in: Nicholas Carlson, “11 Companies that Tried to Buy Facebook Back When it Was a Startup,” Business Insider, May 13, 2010. 13. The Yahoo buyout offer: Fass, “Peter Thiel Talks about the Day Mark Zuckerberg Turned down Yahoo’s $1 Billion.” 14. “It was the first point where we had to look at the future”: Mark Zuckerberg’s August 16, 2016 interview with Sam Altman, “How to Build the Future,” can be viewed on YouTube. 15. he spent most of his time working on an idea: Stephen Levy, “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebook,” Wired, February 12, 2020. 16.

“Lawmakers seem confused about what Facebook does”: Emily Stewart, “Lawmakers Seem Confused about What Facebook Does—and How to Fix It,” Vox, April 10, 2018. 29. The hearings would become fodder: Laura Bradley, “Was Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate Hearing the ‘Worst Punishment of All?’,” Vanity Fair, April 11, 2018. 30. Over ten hours of testimony: Zach Wichter, “2 Days, 10 Hours, 600 Questions: What Happened When Mark Zuckerberg Went to Washington,” New York Times, April 12, 2018. 31. Zuckerberg had added three billion dollars: Natasha Bach, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Net Worth Skyrocketed $3 Billion during His Senate Testimony and Could Rise Again Today,” Fortune, April 11, 2018. Chapter 9: Think Before You Share 1.

As Swisher grilled him about the controversy: Dan Nosowitz, “Mark Zuckerberg Gives Awkward, Sweaty Interview at D8: Touches on Privacy and Scandal,” Fast Company, June 3, 2010. 12. Alex Jones and his conspiracy-laden site: Hadley Freeman, “Sandy Hook Father Leonard Pozner on Death Threats: ‘I Never Imagined I’d Have to Fight for My Child’s Legacy,’” Guardian, May 2, 2017. 13. Swisher pressed Zuckerberg: Kara Swisher, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Recode Decode,” July 18, 2018, podcast interview and transcript can be accessed on the Vox website. 14. Zuckerberg tried to clarify his comments: Kara Swisher, “Mark Zuckerberg Clarifies: ‘I Personally Find Holocaust Denial Deply Offensive, and I Absolutely Didn’t Intend to Defend the Intent of People Who Deny That’,” Vox, July 18, 2018. 15.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

I am a Facebook user, and in many ways I think it is a wonderful tool for communication. I also suspect you will find that Mark Zuckerberg, the brash young man who founded the company at the age of twenty, is growing up and becoming aware of the awesome responsibilities he has in running the world’s largest social network. The bratty kid portrayed in the movie The Social Network may have been changed by marriage and fatherhood. Larry Page, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos are in their forties and fifties. Their libertarian ideals are fairly fixed, but watching the evolution of Mark Zuckerberg over the past ten years is to see a maturation process in both the man and his company.

Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 2010). James Lardner, “The Instant Gratification Project,” Business 2.0, December 2001. Chapter Eight: The Social Media Revolution Harry McCracken, “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Bold Plan for the Future of Facebook, Fast Company, November 16, 2015, www.fastcompany.com/3052885/mark-zuckerberg-facebook. Daniel Hunt, “The Influence of Computer-Mediated Communication Apprehension on Motives for Facebook Use,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 56, no. 2 (June 2012). David Kravets, “Facebook’s $9.5 Million Beacon Settlement Approved,” Wired, September 21, 2012, www.wired.com/2012/09/beacon-settlement-approved/.

ISBN 978-0-316-27574-3 E3-20170222-JV-PC Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Introduction Chapter One: The Great Disruption Chapter Two: Levon’s Story Chapter Three: Tech’s Counterculture Roots Chapter Four: The Libertarian Counterinsurgency Chapter Five: Digital Destruction Chapter Six: Monopoly in the Digital Age Chapter Seven: Google’s Regulatory Capture Chapter Eight: The Social Media Revolution Chapter Nine: Pirates of the Internet Chapter Ten: Libertarians and the 1 Percent Chapter Eleven: What It Means to Be Human Chapter Twelve: The Digital Renaissance Afterword Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Jonathan Taplin Notes Newsletters For Maggie Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you aren’t moving fast enough. —Mark Zuckerberg Introduction I thought I was going to write the story of a culture war. On one side were a few libertarian Internet billionaires—the people who brought you Google, Amazon, and Facebook—and on the other side were the musicians, journalists, photographers, authors, and filmmakers who were trying to figure out how to continue to make a living in the digital age.


pages: 455 words: 133,322

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Benchmark Capital, billion-dollar mistake, Burning Man, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, global village, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Network effects, Peter Thiel, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, SoftBank, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, UUNET, Whole Earth Review, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

There wasn’t any debate. Patterson was enthusiastic. So was Jim Breyer. But while, as usual, Parker had presented Thefacebook’s pitch, Breyer had made a critical discovery while watching the boys demonstrate Thefacebook’s site. “First page of the website,” Breyer wrote in a note to himself, “this is a Mark Zuckerberg company. Mark Zuckerberg is the guy.” Until that moment, it had not been clear to Accel—or to any of the company’s prospective investors aside from Don Graham—that Zuckerberg was the decisionmaker upon whose opinion a deal would rise or fall. Efrusy had barely met Zuckerberg. During the presentation Breyer had asked Zuckerberg to talk a bit about his background and his vision for the company, and Zuckerberg talked for only about two minutes.

He was oblivious, immobilized, hands clasped behind his back, head down, lost in thought. There was a gravity in the man’s demeanor. My friend paused. Despite his family’s exhaustion, his instinct told him not to interrupt. He waited. After a minute or so, the pensive Mark Zuckerberg looked up and continued slowly down the sidewalk. Acknowledgments Thanks go first to Mark Zuckerberg. Had he not encouraged me to write this book and cooperated as I did so, it would likely not have happened. As I proceeded, I often said to myself and to others how much I liked writing a book about someone so committed to transparency. He tried hard to answer even questions that had embarrassing answers.

“Even if they were just upset about a minor issue with the school.” People from the beginning intuitively realized that if this service was intended as a way for them to reflect online their genuine identity, then an element of that identity was their views and passions about the issues of the day. “The Colombia thing,” says Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, “is a very early indicator that governance is changing—[and of how] powerful political organizations can form. These things can really affect peoples’ liberties and freedom, which is kind of the point of government.…In fifteen years maybe there will be things like what happened in Colombia almost every day.”


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

When Gates was asked: Steven Levy, “Bill Gates on Covid: Most US Tests Are ‘Completely Garbage,’” Wired, August 7, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/bill-gates-on-covid-most-us-tests-are-completely-garbage/. “putting power in people’s hands”: Mark Zuckerberg, “A Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement,” Facebook, November 15, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/notes/751449002072082/. Billions of pieces: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634/. “over 300 hours of video”: “YouTube Jobs,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/jobs/. more than 500 million tweets: Raffi Krikorian, “New Tweets per Second Record, and How!

“If you sue us”: Jared Bennett, “Saving Face: Facebook Wants Access Without Limits,” Center for Public Integrity, July 31, 2017, https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/saving-face-facebook-wants-access-without-limits/. “Mark will be in Washington”: Mike Allen, “Scoop: Mark Zuckerberg Returning to Capitol Hill,” Axios, September 18, 2019, https://www.axios.com/mark-zuckerberg-capitol-hill-f75ba9fa-ca5d-4bab-9d58-40bcec96ff87.html. Facebook and Amazon spent: Ryan Tracy, Chad Day, and Anthony DeBarros, “Facebook and Amazon Boosted Lobbying Spending in 2020,” Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-and-amazon-boosted-lobbying-spending-in-2020-11611500400.

“Most members of Congress don’t know”: Kim Zetter, “Of Course Congress Is Clueless About Tech—It Killed Its Tutor,” Wired, April 21, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-congress-clueless-tech-killed-tutor/. spent part of his honeymoon in Rome: Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?,” New Yorker, September 10, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy. employment in sweatshops doubled: “History of Sweatshops: 1880–1940,” National Museum of American History, https://americanhistory.si.edu/sweatshops/history-1880-1940. “broad discretion in the investigation”: Karen Bilodeau, “How the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Changed Workers’ Rights,” Maine Bar Journal 26, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 43–44.


pages: 561 words: 163,916

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

THE BICYCLE ANALOGY LAWYER: If this jury finds that Oculus stole virtual reality technology from ZeniMax, improving upon that technology doesn’t make it yours, does it? MARK ZUCKERBERG: I don’t know . . . I disagree with the premise of your question so it’s kind of hard to get on top of that. LAWYER: Alright, let’s make it real simple: if you steal my bike and you paint it and put a bell on it, does that make it your bike? MARK ZUCKERBERG: No . . . [but] I think the analogy to a bike is extremely over-simplistic here. LAWYER: Probably. MARK ZUCKERBERG: This would be like someone— LAWYER: I agree with you. MARK ZUCKERBERG:—who created a piece of, like, a bar that might go on a bike and then someone built a spaceship out of it.

I mean, it’ll probably still blow you away, but it’s just not as good as the Room.” Zuckerberg was intrigued . . . but still not enough to rearrange his schedule. “I’M GONNA FLY UP TO MENLO PARK AND GIVE A DEMO TO MARK ZUCKERBERG,” Iribe said. “Nice!” Luckey replied. “Any particular objective in mind? Or just because, you know, it’s Mark Zuckerberg? It was mostly because it was Mark Zuckerberg, but Iribe and Malamed had also started throwing around a crazy idea: What if a company like Facebook led our Series C? It wasn’t the type of thing Facebook had done before, but, hey, there’s a first time for everything, right?

So on February 15, he and Ondrejka flew up to Stanford and visited Jeremy Bailenson’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. Then later that day, Zuckerberg texted Amin Zoufonoun. MARK ZUCKERBERG: I just went to this VR lab at Stanford and it was totally awesome. MARK ZUCKERBERG: It also confirmed for me that Oculus is miles ahead of everyone else . . . AMIN ZOUFONOUN: any other interesting learnings about vr? i guess we can talk about it next time. MARK ZUCKERBERG: . . . It’s going to be hard to get Oculus done at lower than the amounts we’ve discussed. The markets are just willing to pay more for it right now independently.


pages: 484 words: 114,613

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

.”: Dan Rookwood, “The Many Stories of Instagram’s Billionaire Founder,” MR PORTER, accessed May 2019, https://www.mrporter.com/en-us/journal/the-interview/the-many-stories-of-instagrams-billionaire-founder/2695. He once lost to a friend’s teenage daughter: Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook?” “Carthago delenda est!”: Antonio García Martínez, “How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War to Crush Google Plus,” Vanity Fair, June 3, 2016, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-mark-zuckerberg-led-facebooks-war-to-crush-google-plus. It was “an artistic choice,”: Colleen Taylor, “Instagram Launches 15-Second Video Sharing Feature, with 13 Filters and Editing,” TechCrunch, June 20, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/20/facebook-instagram-video/.

Ante, and Emily Glazer, “In Facebook Deal, Board Was All but Out of Picture,” Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2012, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304818404577350191931921290. started out by asking for $2 billion: Raice, Ante, and Glazer, “In Facebook Deal, Board Was All but Out of Picture.” The discussions continued at Zuckerberg’s: Mike Swift and Pete Carey, “Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Buys House in Palo Alto,” Mercury News, May 4, 2011, https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/05/04/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-buys-house-in-palo-alto/. But if it’s a bubble: Aileen Lee, “Welcome to the Unicorn Club, 2015: Learning from Billion-Dollar Companies,” TechCrunch, July 18, 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/18/welcome-to-the-unicorn-club-2015-learning-from-billion-dollar-companies/.

selling to a South Korean company, Daum Kakao: Edwin Chan and Sarah Frier, “Morin Sells Chat App Path to South Korea’s Daum Kakao,” Bloomberg.com, May 29, 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-29/path-s-david-morin-sells-chat-app-to-south-korea-s-daum-kakao. It was Facebook’s job to not let anyone: Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?,” New Yorker, September 10, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy. Analysts would later say that approving: Kurt Wagner, “Facebook’s Acquisition of Instagram Was the Greatest Regulatory Failure of the Past Decade, Says Stratechery’s Ben Thompson,” Vox, June 2, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/6/2/17413786/ben-thompson-facebook-google-aggregator-platform-code-conference-2018.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

Cambridge Analytica controversy: Carole Cadwalladr, “ ‘I Made Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool’: Meet the Data War Whistleblower,” Guardian, March 18, 2018. Mark Zuckerberg to testify: Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and chief executive officer of Facebook, testimony at hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary and Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, April 10, 2018, https://en.wikisource.org/​wiki/​Zuckerberg_Senate_Transcript_2018; Mark Zuckerberg, testimony at hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, April 11, 2018, https://docs.house.gov/​meetings/​IF/​IF00/​20180411/​108090/​HHRG-115-IF00-Transcript-20180411.pdf; Mark Zuckerberg, testimony at meeting of the Conference of Presidents of the European Parliament, Brussels, May 22, 2018, https://www.c-span.org/​video/​?

New users flocked to social platforms in droves, building armies of fresh profiles, wiring into what I call the “Hype Machine”—the real-time communications ecosystem created by social media. Describing their attempts to cope with the demand, Alex Schultz and Jay Parikh, Facebook’s heads of analytics and engineering, respectively, wrote, “Usage growth from COVID-19 is unprecedented across the industry, and we are experiencing new records in usage every day.” Mark Zuckerberg was blunter: “We’re just trying to keep the lights on over here,” he said. As the entire planet was denied physical contact for months on end, the coronavirus shocked our use and perception of social technologies in dramatic ways. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram became indispensable sources of human connection, timely medical information, social support, outreach, pandemic fundraising, free impromptu concerts, collaborative art projects, and real-time updates about the spread of the virus.

They care about the future of our planet. They’re wicked smart, and they’re committed to making the world a better place. But social media’s impact on the world is not determined by intention alone. As we all know, there have been many missteps in building the Hype Machine. Following the death of George Floyd, Mark Zuckerberg defended his decision to allow unaltered and unlabeled, divisive and inflammatory Facebook messages by President Trump that seemed to threaten violence in response to the protests and including the words “when the looting starts the shooting starts,” a phrase used by police chiefs and segregationist politicians during crackdowns against the civil rights movement.


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The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

., 2016. 23 “Now, in that case”: “Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s Hardest Year, and What Comes Next,” Ezra Klein, Vox, April 2, 2018. 24 “overreliance on third parties”: “Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg,” Phandeeyar et al., April 5, 2018. 25 sent the groups an email apologizing: “Zuckerberg Was Called Out Over Myanmar Violence. Here’s His Apology,” Kevin Roose and Paul Mozur, New York Times, April 9, 2018. 26 formal report on the genocide: Report of Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, United Nations Human Rights Council, August 27, 2018. 27 “You can’t just snap”: “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?”

Adamic, Science 348, no. 6239, May 7, 2015. 28 “associated with adopting more extreme”: Ibid. 29 “Which of the big questions”: Exchange is from the comments field in “For the Next Hour I’ll Be Here Answering Your Questions on Facebook,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook.com, June 30, 2015. 30 “Every time you use Facebook”: “Inside Facebook’s AI Machine,” Steven Levy, Wired, February 2017. 31 “If they do these”: “News Feed: Getting Your Content to the Right People,” Adam Mosseri, presentation to Facebook F8 conference in San Francisco, April 21, 2016. 32 “When users spend more”: Doerr: 161. 33 Facebook engineers were automatically: “I was an eng leader on Facebook’s NewsFeed,” Krishna Gade, Twitter, February 11, 2021. Twitter.com/krishnagade/status/1359908897998315521 34 “You start thinking about”: “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?”

., Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, January 2020. 42 combined 50 million views: “Untrue-Tube: Monetizing Misery and Disinformation,” Jonathan Albright, Medium.com, February 25, 2018. 43 policy team recommended: “YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant,” Mark Bergen, Bloomberg, April 2, 2019. 44 “an almost inconceivable battle”: “An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg,” Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, The Guardian, July 25, 2018. 45 “We created Facebook”: “Facebook Touts Fight on Fake News, but Struggles to Explain Why InfoWars Isn’t Banned,” Oliver Darcy, CNN, July 11, 2018. 46 “I’m Jewish, and”: “Zuckerberg: The Recode Interview,” Kara Swisher, Recode, October 8, 2018. 47 “We’re going to hold Jones”: Tweet by Jack Dorsey (@jack), August 7, 2018. twitter.com/jack/status/1026984245925793792 48 “I don’t believe that it is the right”: “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook before It Breaks Democracy?”


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Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

CHAPTER 17: IMPOTENCE “I really want to clear my life to make it”: Eugene Kim, “Here’s the Real Reason Mark Zuckerberg Wears the Same T-Shirt Every Day,” Business Insider, November 6, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-same-t-shirt-2014-11. when he testified before Congress in April 2018: Vanessa Friedman, “Mark Zuckerberg’s I’m Sorry Suit,” New York Times, April 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/fashion/mark-zuckerberg-suit-congress.html. Some called it his “I’m sorry” suit: Ibid. Others said his haircut: Max Lakin, “The $300 T-Shirt Mark Zuckerberg Didn’t Wear in Congress Could Hold Facebook’s Future,” W magazine, April 12, 2018, https://www.wmagazine.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-brunello-cucinelli-t-shirt/.

Others said his haircut: Max Lakin, “The $300 T-Shirt Mark Zuckerberg Didn’t Wear in Congress Could Hold Facebook’s Future,” W magazine, April 12, 2018, https://www.wmagazine.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-brunello-cucinelli-t-shirt/. reported that the British start-up Cambridge Analytica: Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, and Carole Cadwalladr, “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions,” New York Times, March 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html. Zuckerberg endured ten hours of testimony over two days: Zach Wichter, “2 Days, 10 Hours, 600 Questions: What Happened When Mark Zuckerberg Went to Washington,” New York Times, April 12, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/technology/mark-zuckerberg-testimony.html.

After about fifteen minutes with the code, Dean knew DeepMind would fit with Google. “It was clearly done by people who knew what they were doing,” he says. “I just felt like their culture would be compatible with our culture.” By this point, there was little doubt Google would acquire the London lab. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook had recently joined Google, Microsoft, and Baidu in the race to acquire this kind of talent, and Google was intent on staying ahead. Though Hassabis had long promised his employees that DeepMind would stay independent, he now had no choice but to sell. If DeepMind didn’t sell, it would die.


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Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

Product/Market Fit Facebook achieved product/market fit for its core consumer experience almost immediately, hence its rapid growth. However, part of what makes Facebook a great company and Mark Zuckerberg a great CEO is that Facebook has been able to achieve product/market fit in additional and less obvious areas at other points in the company’s history. Many people forget how Facebook struggled with the transition from desktop to mobile. Facebook’s initial mobile product provided a slow, suboptimal experience, and adoption of that product was accordingly slow. Fortunately for Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg saw that the market was going mobile and put a moratorium on new feature development in order to focus the entire team on building a new, far superior mobile product.

But he and his team had spent eighteen seemingly fruitless months working on Airbnb before entering Y Combinator, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. After all the blood, sweat, and tears, were they really willing to give up a quarter of their company? Ultimately, Brian decided not to buy Wimdu, swayed in part by the arguments of his key advisers. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg counseled him to fight. “Don’t buy them,” he said. “The best product will win.” YC’s Paul Graham gave similar feedback. “They’re mercenaries. You’re missionaries,” he told Brian. “They’re like people raising a baby they don’t actually want.” When Brian reached out to me for my advice on the situation, I too advised him not to buy Wimdu.

The year-over-year revenue growth during its first few years of existence were 2,150 percent, 433 percent, and 219 percent, going from zero to $153 million in revenue in 2007. Then the company went through a key transition, and growth dropped into the double-digit range as Facebook struggled with both monetization and the shift from desktop to mobile. Fortunately, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made two important moves: he personally led a shift from desktop-first to mobile-first, and he hired Sheryl Sandberg as the company’s COO, who in turn built Facebook into an advertising sales juggernaut. Growth rose back into the triple-digit range, and, by 2010, these moves had pushed Facebook’s revenues to over $2 billion.


Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

Go to note reference in text It looked to many observers: Michael Sebastian, “Read Gawker’s Shocking Response to a Video of a Young Woman Possibly Being Raped,” Cosmopolitan, March 12, 2016, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/news/a55146/gawker-editor-sex-tape-aj-daulerio/. Go to note reference in text And it applied particularly: Owen Thomas, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Double Life,” Gawker, July 9, 2007, https://www.gawker.com/276473/mark-zuckerbergs-double-life. Go to note reference in text But Tate concluded with trademark: Ryan Tate, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Age of Privacy Is Over,” Gawker, July 28, 2010, https://www.gawker.com/5597100/mark-zuckerbergs-age-of-privacy-is-over. Go to note reference in text “I’d like to reach into”: A.J. Daulerio, “Brett Favre’s Cellphone Seduction of Jenn Sterger (Update),” Deadspin, October 7, 2010, https://deadspin.com/brett-favres-cellphone-seduction-of-jenn-sterger-upda-5658206.

Go to note reference in text “Marissa Mayer used to date”: “Editorial: Google’s Power Couple,” Valleywag, February 2, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20060207012737/http://www.valleywag.com/tech/marissa-mayer/editorial-googles-power-couple-152210.php. Go to note reference in text One particular target: Nick Douglas, “We Want to Know If You’re Single Mark Zuckerberg so We Can Contact You Maybe,” Gawker, September 8, 2006, https://www.gawker.com/199540%2Fwe-want-to-know-if-youre-single-mark-zuckerberg-so-we-can-contact-you-maybe. Go to note reference in text “Mark, get some shoes”: Nick Douglas, “Mark Zuckerberg, No One Wants to See Your Toes,” Gawker, November 10, 2006, https://www.gawker.com/214115%2Fmark-zuckerberg-no-one-wants-to-see-your-toes. Go to note reference in text A week later, right after: Nick Denton, “Smoking Sarah Lacy,” Gawker, November 14, 2006, https://gawker.com/214733/smoking-sarah-lacy.

It was an incredible ride, Douglas remembered later. Once he walked up to Mayer at a party at Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s lavish mansion, and she literally ran away from him. For the young blogger, it was “a sick, undeserved rush of power.” One particular target was the young founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. “We Want to Know If You’re Single Mark Zuckerberg so We Can Contact You Maybe,” read one headline soon after the blog’s launch. “Mark, get some shoes—bitch,” Douglas advised after Zuck turned up at a conference in November 2006 wearing sandals. But Douglas couldn’t quite get the hang of it. He wasn’t getting the quality of gossip that Nick Denton wanted, and he didn’t seem to have much grasp of the business story, the only reason anyone cared about the Valley anyway.


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The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

unwillingness to stop disinformation: Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, “Chenault Leaves Facebook Board after Disagreements with Zuckerberg,” The Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chenault-leaves-facebook-board-after-disagreements-with-zuckerberg-11584140731. displayed copies of Xi’s book: Adam Taylor, “Why Would Mark Zuckerberg Want Facebook Employees to Read the Chinese President’s Book?” The Washington Post, December 8, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/08/why-does-mark-zuckerberg-want-facebook-employees-to-read-the-chinese-presidents-book/. honorary Chinese name: Emily Smith, “Chinese President Snubs Mark Zuckerberg’s Unborn Child,” The New York Post, October 2, 2015, https://pagesix.com/2015/10/02/chinese-president-snubs-mark-zuckerbergs-unborn-child/. disseminated pro-Trump hoaxes: Sheera Frenkel et al., “Delay, Deny, Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought through Crisis,” The New York Times, November 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html.

whatever they wanted: Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, “Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook—and the World,” Wired, February 12, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2-years-of-hell/. much of it in Trump’s favor: Craig Silverman, “This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook,” BuzzFeed, November 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook. would eventually apologize: Siobhan Hughes, “Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook Made Mistakes on ‘Fake News,’ Privacy,” The Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-made-mistakes-on-fake-news-privacy-1523289089.

., “Delay, Deny, Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought through Crisis,” The New York Times, November 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html. “This is fun”: Matt Weaver, “Video: Dale Jr. Turns Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg into a NASCAR Fan with Test Drive,” Autoweek, March 14, 2017, https://www.autoweek.com/racing/nascar/a1816901/video-dale-jr-turns-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-nascar-fan-test-drive/. “adviser to the Trump Administration”: Mark Zuckerberg, filmed May 12, 2017, at North Carolina A&T State University, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyuoABPtDzc. told CNN that Facebook: Tom McKay, “Kamala Harris Says ‘We Have to Seriously Take a Look At’ Breaking Up Facebook, Gizmodo, May 12, 2019, https://gizmodo.com/kamala-harris-says-we-need-to-seriously-take-a-look-at-1834706259.


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The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

But for the unintentional and the unexpected, nothing beats the history of Facebook, the Internet’s dominant social network, which was created by a young man so socially awkward that many consider him autistic. In his aptly named Accidental Billionaires, the bestselling story of Facebook’s early years on the campus of Harvard University, and on which David Fincher’s Academy Award–nominated 2010 movie The Social Network movie is based, Ben Mezrich reveals that the twenty-year-old Mark Zuckerberg was seen as a total misfit by Harvard contemporaries. Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s cofounder of “Thefacebook.com,” which they launched together in February 2004, thought of his partner as the socially “uncomfortable” and “awkward kid in the class,” a “complete mystery” with whom communication “was like talking to a computer,” while other Harvard students saw him as a “weird” and “socially autistic” geek with a “dead fish handshake.”81 Even after Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard later in 2004 and, a decade later, built Facebook into the Internet’s dominant social network, he still hadn’t shaken off his image as a socially disabled loner suffering from what Wired dubs “the Geek Syndrome.”82 Facebook’s onetime head of engineering, Yishan Wong, claimed that Zuckerberg has a “touch of Asperger’s” and “zero empathy.”83 And other seasoned Zuckerberg watchers, like Nicholas Carlson, the chief business correspondent at Business Insider, agree, seeing both his “obvious brilliance” and “his inability to hold conversation” as a “symptom” of his autism.84 But, in spite of—or, perhaps, because of—his inability to fashion a conversation, Zuckerberg has created the greatest generator of conversation in history, a social computer network whose 1.3 billion users were, by the summer of 2014, posting 2,460,000 comments to one another every minute of every day.

This was followed by Friendster in 2002 and then, in 2003, by the Los Angeles–based MySpace, a social network with a music and Hollywood focus that, at its 2008 peak, when it was acquired by News Corporation for $580 million, had 75.9 million members.86 But Facebook, which until September 2006 was exclusively made up of high school and university students, offered a less cluttered and more intuitive interface than MySpace. So, having opened its doors to the world outside of schools and universities, the so-called Mark Zuckerberg Production quickly became the Internet’s largest social network, amassing 100 million members by August 2008. And then the network effect, that positive feedback loop that makes the Internet such a classic winner-take-all market, kicked in. By February 2010, the Facebook community had grown to 400 million members, who spent 8 billion minutes each day on a network already operating in 75 different languages.87 Facebook had become the world’s second most popular Internet site after Google, a position that it’s maintained ever since.

By the summer of 2014 Facebook had grown to rival China’s population—hosting more than 1.3 billion members, around 19% of the people in the world, with 50% of them accessing the social network at least six days a week.88 Like Google, Facebook is becoming ever more powerful. In 2014 it made the successful shift to mobile technology, its app being “far and away the most popular service” on both the iOS and Android platforms, with its users spending an astonishing 17% of all their smartphone time in it. Mark Zuckerberg’s ten-year-old Internet company is thus likely to remain, with archrival Google, the Internet’s dominant company over the second decade of its remarkable history. Like Google, Facebook’s goal is to establish itself as a platform rather than a single website—a strategy that distinguishes it from failed Web 1.0 “portal”-style networks like MySpace.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

_r=1&mtrref=en.wikipedia.org. 46 more than a million active accounts: Ami Sedghi, “Facebook: 10 Years of Social Networking, in Numbers,” The Guardian, February 4, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/feb/04/facebook-in-numbers-statistics. 46 58 million users: Ibid. 46 “300 million stories a day”: Tom Loftus, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Best Quotes,” Digits (blog), Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/02/01/mark-zuckerbergs-best-quotes/. 46 2 billion users: Kaya Yurieff, “Facebook Hits 2 Billion Monthly Users,” CNNMoney, June 27, 2017, http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/27/technology/facebook-2-billion-users/index.html. 46 He would show off: Sarah Perez, “Mark Zuckerberg Meets Pope Francis, Gives Him a Drone,” TechCrunch, August 29, 2016, https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/29/mark-zuckerberg-meets-pope-francis-gives-him-a-drone/. 46 arbitrate the pleas: Vitaly Shevchenko, “Ukrainians Petition Facebook Against ‘Russian Trolls,’” BBC News, May 13, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32720965. 47 “Apple is reinventing”: Mic Wright, “The Original iPhone Announcement Annotated: Steve Jobs’ Genius Meets Genius,” The Next Web, September 9, 2015, https://thenextweb.com/apple/2015/09/09/genius-annotated-with-genius/. 47 $10,000: John F.

Senator,” Reuters, September 7, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-propoganda/twitter-to-brief-congress-on-possible-russia-backed-ads-u-s-senator-idUSKCN1BI22R. 241 Zuckerberg apologized: Sam Levin, “Mark Zuckerberg: I Regret Ridiculing Fears over Facebook’s Effect on Election,” The Guardian, September 27, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-2016-election-fake-news. 241 “I don’t want anyone”: Kurt Wager, “Read Mark Zuckerberg’s Full Speech on How Facebook Is Fighting Back Against Russia’s Election Interference,” Recode, September 21, 2017, https://www.recode.net/2017/9/21/16347036/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-russia-election-interference-full-speech. 241 “the biggest risk we face”: Steve Huffman, “In Response to Recent Reports About the Integrity of Reddit, I’d Like to Share Our Thinking,” Reddit, March 5, 2018, https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/827zqc/in_response_to_recent_reports_about_the_integrity/. 241 $57 million: Melissa Eddy and Mark Scott, “Delete Hate Speech or Pay Up, Germany Tells Social Media Companies,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/business/germany-facebook-google-twitter.html. 242 Federal Election Commission disclosure rules: Heather Timmons, “The US Want to Regulate Political Advertising on Social Media,” World Economic Forum, October 19, 2017, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/10/the-us-want-to-regulate-political-advertising-on-social-media. 242 same exemptions as skywriting: Donie O’Sullivan, “Facebook Sought Exception from Political Ad Disclaimer Rules in 2011,” CNNMoney, September 27, 2017, CNN Money, http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/technology/business/facebook-political-ad-rules/index.html. 242 As Zuckerberg confessed: Kevin Roose and Sheera Frenkel, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Reckoning: ‘This Is a Major Trust Issue,’” New York Times, March 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/technology/mark-zuckerberg-q-and-a.html?

., “Social Implications of the Internet,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 309. 41 Bowie waxed philosophical: Matt Novak, “Watching David Bowie Argue with an Interviewer About the Future of the Internet Is Beautiful,” Paleofuture, January 10, 2017, https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/watching-david-bowie-argue-with-an-interviewer-about-th-1791017656. 42 “The goal wasn’t”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Facebook Interview,” YouTube video, 04:49, uploaded by Derek Franzese, March 26, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=—APdD6vejI. 42 had built ZuckNet: Phillip Tracy, “Before Facebook, There Was ‘ZuckNet,’ the Chat Service 12-Year-Old Mark Zuckerberg Built for His Family,” The Daily Dot, https://www.dailydot.com/debug/mark-zuckerberg-messaging-service-zucknet/. 42 a bold, crude proclamation: Bari Schwartz, “Hot or Not? Website Briefly Judges Looks,” Harvard Crimson, November 4, 2003, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/4/hot-or-not-website-briefly-judges/?


pages: 285 words: 91,144

App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream by Michael Sayman

airport security, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, data science, Day of the Dead, fake news, Frank Gehry, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Googley, hacker house, imposter syndrome, Khan Academy, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, microaggression, move fast and break things, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, the High Line, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

I burst into tears right there in front of him. After a few embarrassing sobs, I wiped my nose on my sleeve, blinked, and in the bravest voice I could muster I said, “I can’t go to summer school. I have an offer from Mark Zuckerberg! To intern at Facebook!” Mr. Thanos pushed back his chair and stood up from his desk. “Mark Zuckerberg can wait.” So, that was that. Authority had spoken. I went straight home, called Mark Zuckerberg, and told him I couldn’t do the internship—summer school was more important. Ha ha. Hell no! Kidding, obviously. I ended up going to the school president and convincing him to let me walk in graduation—even though I wouldn’t be graduating, now or ever.

Chapter 7 Big in Peru About a week after Zuckerberg saw my pajama video, I was sitting in my precalculus class, not listening to my teacher, when an email came in from Facebook, inviting me to apply for an internship. A second email arrived minutes after that: “Mark Zuckerberg would like to meet you, so we’d like to have you fly out.” My teacher’s voice grew even more distant. This couldn’t be real. I banged my forehead on my desk once to verify that I was actually awake. Yep, I was. “What happened?” whispered the kid sitting in the row next to me, poking me in the shoulder with his pencil. Speechless, I turned and handed him my iPad. He scanned the email, stood up, and blurted to the room, “Mark Zuckerberg wants to hire Michael!” My classmates started to freak out. The teacher marched over and took the iPad away.

It was easier for me, in Miami with my fast Internet and good technology, than it will be for you. But if you are determined—súper determinada—you will succeed. I honestly believe that. And I believe in you! Love, Michael. Chapter 8 Meeting Mark Zuckerberg After Peru, things really took off. 4 Snaps had reached almost a million users in the United States, and a few larger companies seemed interested in acquiring it. Two weeks after my trip, I flew to California with my mom to meet Mark Zuckerberg, at his request. My mom had no idea who he was, even though she had a Facebook account for sharing pictures with family back in Peru. Days before the meeting, she’d quickly Googled Zuckerberg’s name; the only detail that stuck out to her was the fact that he was Jewish, like my father.


pages: 359 words: 96,019

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

An accompanying article promising “The Inside Story of Snapchat” ran on January 6, just three days after Primack said that Evan should be fired for the hack and refusing to apologize. The article began with an anecdote about Mark Zuckerberg emailing Evan to meet and Evan brashly responding “I’m happy to meet you … if you come to me.” Business Insider reporter Alyson Shontell tweeted her summary of the story with a caption, “If you didn’t think Spiegel was arrogant before, his email to Mark Zuckerberg will convince you.” Evan took to Twitter and replied with screenshots of his emails with Zuckerberg, showing that while he hadn’t agreed to rush right up to Facebook, he hadn’t played it quite as brashly as the Forbes story portrayed: Hey Evan, I’m a big fan of what you’re doing with Snapchat.

Forbes, January 6, 2014. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2014/01/06/the-inside-story-of-snapchat-the-worlds-hottest-app-or-a-3-billion-disappearing-act/#3961325c67d2 Constine, Josh. “Facebook Launches Snapchat Competitor ‘Poke,’ an iOS App for Sending Expiring Text, Photos, and Videos.” TechCrunch, December 21, 2012. https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-app/ ________. “Mark Zuckerberg Is the Voice Behind the ‘Poke’ Notification Sound and Wrote Code for the App.” TechCrunch, December 21, 2012. https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/mark-zuckerberg-voice-of-poke/ Gallagher, Billy. “Snapchat Co-Founder Evan Spiegel Responds to Poke: ‘Welcome, Facebook. Seriously.’” TechCrunch, December 21, 2102. http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/snapchat-co-founder-evan-spiegel-responds-to-poke-welcome-facebook-seriously/ ________.

“Data Shows Online Buzz about Snapchat Is Skyrocketing after the Launch of Facebook Poke.” TechCrunch, December 28, 2012. https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/28/data-shows-online-buzz-about-snapchat-is-skyrocketing-after-the-launch-of-facebook-poke/ Wingfield, Nick, and Mike Isaac. “Mark Zuckerberg, in Suit, Testifies in Oculus Intellectual Property Trial.” New York Times, January 17, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/technology/mark-zuckerberg-oculus-trial-virtual-reality-facebook.html?_r=0 Chapter Twelve: Reggie’s Return Gallagher, Billy. “Snapchat Founders Face New Twist in Legal Battle as Alleged Co-Founder Files to Disqualify Their Lawyers.” TechCrunch, July 1, 2013. http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/01/ephemeral-representation/ ________.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

And, as Callahan points out in The Givers, Bill Gates and his Gates Foundation have become the model for “the disrupters”—a new generation of young tech super-citizens including Facebook billionaires like the company’s former president Sean Parker, its cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, and Mark Zuckerberg himself.13 So how should today’s tech billionaires be giving away their money? What makes a good Silicon Valley super-citizen in our new gilded age? It’s Complicated It’s certainly complicated. Just as whole books have been written about the morally complex philanthropy of the Stanfords, Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts, so a book should, and no doubt will, be written about Mark Zuckerberg’s much-publicized and highly controversial commitment to the public good. Yes, in 2015, the thirty-one-year-old Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to great public fanfare, committed to donating a breathtaking 99 percent of their then $45 billion wealth to “charity.”

And freedom, particularly online freedom, she continued, should involve what she called “the right to be forgotten,” making reference to an EU regulation that is part of an ambitious package to protect privacy. Not surprisingly, given much of the audience’s vested interest in a post-privacy economy, Vestager’s presentation was greeted with only a smattering of polite applause. All the questions after the speech were hostile too. One well-known American tech pundit, a friend of Mark Zuckerberg and the author of an evangelical book about Facebook’s power to unite the world, posed a particularly loaded question about the implications of Vestager’s critique of Silicon Valley’s core business model. “Aren’t you worried,” he remarked in the morally pinched tone of a disappointed American internationalist, “about the fragmentation of the internet?”

In February 2017, Facebook began working with Correctiv, a Berlin based nonprofit media start-up that is developing fact-checking software for exposing fake news.40 Then, responding to an April 2017 Cleveland murder video that stayed up on Facebook for hours before being removed and a Facebook video of a Thai man killing his eleven-month-old daughter, the social media behemoth finally took measures to actively police its content. In May 2017, in response also to the announcement of the punitive new German law around online hate speech, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would hire three thousand more editors—supplementing the forty-five hundred gatekeepers already on this team—to review the user-generated content.41 Now all Facebook needs to do is pay these editors a fair wage for such an important and emotionally draining job. “We were underpaid and undervalued,” one Facebook editor complained about a job in which he was paid $15 an hour to, in his words, “turn on your computer and watch someone have their head cut off.


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

I just met with this kid Mark Zuckerberg, who is very smart, and he’s the guy building Facebook, and they say they have a ‘secret feature’ that’s going to launch that’s going to change everything! But he won’t tell me what it is. It’s driving me crazy. I can’t figure out what it is. Do you know anything about this? Can you figure it out? What do you think it could be?” And so we spent a little time talking about it, and we couldn’t really figure out what their “secret feature” that was going to change everything was. We got kind of obsessed about it. Two months after meeting Sean Parker, Mark Zuckerberg moved to Silicon Valley with the idea of turning his dorm-room project into a real business.

Imagine your freshman dorm running a business, that’s really what it felt like. Mark Zuckerberg: Most businesses aren’t like a bunch of kids living in a house, doing whatever they want, not waking up at a normal time, not going into an office, hiring people by, like, bringing them into your house and letting them chill with you for a while and party with you and smoke with you. Ezra Callahan: The living room was the office with all these monitors and workstations set up everywhere and just whiteboards as far as the eye can see. At the time Mark Zuckerberg was obsessed with file sharing, and the grand plan for his Silicon Valley summer was to resurrect Napster.

Katie Geminder: That was very challenging for someone who was trying to actually live an adult life with like a husband. There was definitely a feeling that because you were older and married and had a life outside of work that you weren’t committed. Mark Zuckerberg: Why are most chess masters under thirty? Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family… I only own a mattress. Kate Geminder: Imagine being under thirty and hearing your boss say that! Mark Zuckerberg: Young people are just smarter. Ruchi Sanghvi: We were so young back then. We definitely had tons of energy and we could do it, but we weren’t necessarily the most efficient team by any means whatsoever.


pages: 239 words: 80,319

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

In other examples, critics zeroed in on the personal deficiencies of various founders and let that stand for critique of the power of their companies and abuse of that power. David Fincher’s 2010 film, The Social Network, followed this line of attack, as it characterized Mark Zuckerberg as a spiteful backstabber and Facebook as a product in his image (auteur theory, but for Silicon Valley). This correlation without basis—bad man equals bad company—offered an easy gambit to neutralize the diatribe. Indeed, several months after the film was released, its message was subject to reappraisal. Aaron Sorkin apologized to Mark Zuckerberg at the Golden Globes, where he received an award for best screenplay. He was “wrong,” he said onstage at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

The JavaScript bookmarklet “Stalker List,” which scraped Facebook’s JSON file that calculated the “affinity scores,” was available on Thekeesh.com (“Who Does Facebook Think You Are Searching For?,” March 28, 2013). The podcast and transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s interview with Kara Swisher is available on Recode (“Full Transcript: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Recode Decode,” July 18, 2018). I interviewed Kate Losse on March 31, 2018. Her comment “this person looks at another person’s page a lot” comes from a previous interview with Losse that took place in 2013. On the subject of Facebook-branded relationships, I was inspired by Anna Lauren Hoffmann’s observation that “information gathered on Facebook is, in fundamental ways, produced not by users, but by Facebook itself.

While backing up files is an individual solution, Google’s deletion of information is a break in shared knowledge: blog readers looking to reread an old post that has been lost are left with only their faulty memories of it. Steven Levy’s 2011 book In the Plex details a baffling exchange with Sergey Brin, who couldn’t understand why he was writing a book about the company in the first place. “Why don’t you just write some articles?” Brin asked Levy. “Or release this a chapter at a time?” (Mark Zuckerberg had similar antipathy. On his own social network, in its early years, he responded to the profile topic “Favorite Books” with “I don’t read.”) Brin made similar comments to Ken Auletta, who relayed these quotes in his book Googled, published in 2009. “People don’t buy books,” Brin said to Auletta.


How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

Starting in 2016, we began highlighting impunity on two fronts: President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Let me tell you why the rest of the world needs to pay attention to what happens in the Philippines: 2021 was the sixth year in a row that Filipinos—out of all global citizens—spent the most time on the internet and on social media.2 Despite slow internet speeds, Filipinos uploaded and downloaded the largest number of videos on YouTube in 2013. Four years later, 97 percent of our country’s citizens were on Facebook. When I told that statistic to Mark Zuckerberg in 2017, he was quiet for a beat. “Wait, Maria,” he finally responded, looking directly at me, “where are the other three percent?”

“Free Basics Partner Stories: Rappler,” Facebook, April 12, 2016, https://developers.facebook.com/videos/f8-2016/free-basics-partner-stories-rappler/. 4.David Cohen, “Facebook Opens Philippines Office,” Adweek, April 22, 2018, https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/facebook-philippines/. 5.Mong Palatino, “Free Basics in Philippines,” Global Voices, March–April 2017, https://advox.globalvoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/PHILIPPINES.pdf. 6.Globe Telecom, Inc., “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Philippines a Successful Test Bed for Internet.org Initiative with Globe Telecom Partnership,” Cision, February 24, 2014, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-philippines-a-successful-test-bed-for-internetorg-initiative-with-globe-telecom-partnership-247184981.html. 7.Miguel R. Camus, “MVP Admits PLDT Losing to Globe in Market Share,” Inquirer.net, January 13, 2017, https://business.inquirer.net/222861/mvp-admits-pldt-losing-globe-market-share. 8.

One of our first initiatives was experimenting with Facebook, which we had recognized at ABS-CBN in 2008 as an undeniable force for mobilization. We started posting our experiments on our Facebook page, Move.PH.3 If the search function on Facebook had worked better, perhaps we would never have launched our own website. In the beginning, we felt so much excitement, so much optimism, about what Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, might do for a country like the Philippines and our democratic future. We launched our first public event on social media: a four-hour workshop for five hundred students at the University of the Philippines in the cool northern city of Baguio, about a four-hour drive from Manila. The idea was to train those students in how to use social media for good; we focused on local environmental concerns and ways to use social media to address them.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

“How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do”: Steven Levy, “Google’s Larry Page on Why Moon Shots Matter,” Wired, January 17, 2013. how Google will someday employ more than one million people: Levy, Wired, January 17, 2013. CHAPTER THREE: MARK ZUCKERBERG’S WAR ON FREE WILL But they were really small-minded paper-pushers: Steven Levy, Hackers (O’Reilly Media, 2010), 29, 96. a box that enabled free long-distance calls: Markoff, Dormouse, 272. In high school—using the nom de hack Zuck Fader: Patrick Gillespie, “Was Mark Zuckerberg an AOL Add-on Developer?,” patorjk.com, April 9, 2013. “One thing is certain,” he wrote on a blog: Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires (Anchor Books, 2009), 49.

“One thing is certain,” he wrote on a blog: Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires (Anchor Books, 2009), 49. “We’ve got this whole ethos that we want to build a hacker culture”: Levy, Hackers, 475. “just this group of computer scientists who were trying to quickly prototype”: “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on stumbles: ‘There’s always a next move,’” Today, February 4, 2014. “Move Fast and Break Things”: “Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter to Investors: ‘The Hacker Way,’” Wired, February 1, 2012. “It was always very important for our brand”: David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect (Simon & Schuster, 2010), 144. “radical transparency” or “ultimate transparency”: Kirkpatrick, 209.

Classification: LCC T14.5 (ebook) | LCC T14.5 .F63 2017 (print) | DDC 303.48/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008656 Version_1 TO BERT FOER Ardent Trustbuster, Gentle Father “The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.” Thomas Jefferson, 1773 CONTENTS Also by Franklin Foer Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph PROLOGUE SECTION I THE MONOPOLISTS OF MIND 1. THE VALLEY IS WHOLE, THE WORLD IS ONE 2. THE GOOGLE THEORY OF HISTORY 3. MARK ZUCKERBERG’S WAR ON FREE WILL 4. JEFF BEZOS DISRUPTS KNOWLEDGE 5. KEEPERS OF THE BIG GATE IN THE SKY 6. BIG TECH’S SMOKE-FILLED ROOM SECTION II WORLD WITHOUT MIND 7. THE VIRALITY VIRUS 8. DEATH OF THE AUTHOR SECTION III TAKE BACK THE MIND 9. IN SEARCH OF THE ANGEL OF DATA 10.


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Hannah Kuchler, ‘Facebook launches journalism project’, Financial Times, 11 January 2017. 11. When Mark Zuckerberg writes . . . Jeff John Roberts, ‘Why Facebook Won’t Admit It’s a Media Company’, Fortune, 14 November 2016; Karissa Bell, ‘Facebook: We’re not a media company. Also Facebook: Watch our news shows’, Mashable, 8 June 2018. 12. Mark Zuckerberg’s extreme agnosticism . . . Kara Swisher, ‘Full transcript: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Recode Decode’, Recode (www.recode.net), 18 July 2018; Alex Hern, ‘Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks on Holocaust denial “irresponsible”’, Guardian, 19 July 2018. 13. Facebook’s old media competitors miss the mark . . .

I shouldn’t have trusted Mark Zuckerberg’, Guardian, 17 April 2018. 6. He told a friend . . . Josh Halliday, ‘Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg college messages reveal steely ambition’, Guardian, 18 May 2012. 7. But one of Twitter’s early founders . . . Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, Penguin: New York, 2013, p. 152. 8. As he told the university newspaper . . . Alan J. Tabak, ‘Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website’, The Harvard Crimson, 9 February 2004; see also Tom Huddleston Jr., ‘Here’s how 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg described “The Facebook” in his first TV interview’, CNBC, 17 April 2018. 9.

Google has funded a UK start-up, Factmata, to develop tools for automatically checking facts – such as, say, economic growth figures, or the numbers of immigrants arriving in the USA last year. Twitter uses tools created by IBM Watson to target cyberbullying, while a Google project, Conversation AI, promises to detect aggressive users with sophisticated AI technology. And as depression and suicide become more common, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new tools to combat depression, with Zuckerberg even claiming that AI could spot suicidal tendencies in a user before a friend would. But the social industry giants are increasingly caught out by a growing number of defectors, who have expressed regret over the tools they helped create.


pages: 260 words: 67,823

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

“Growth at Any Cost: Top Facebook Executive Defended Data Collection in 2016 Memo—and Warned That Facebook Could Get People Killed.” BuzzFeed News. BuzzFeed News, March 29, 2018. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data. his opening statement: Stewart, Emily. “What Mark Zuckerberg Will Tell Congress About the Facebook Scandals.” Vox. Vox, April 10, 2018. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/9/17215640/mark-zuckerberg-congress-testimony-facebook. Cameroon: McAllister, Edward. “Facebook’s Cameroon Problem: Stop Online Hate Stoking Conflict.” Reuters. Thomson Reuters, November 4, 2018. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cameroon-insight/facebooks-cameroon-problem-stop-online-hate-stoking-conflict-idUSKCN1NA0GW.

Medium, September 4, 2018. https://medium.com/square-corner-blog/a-silent-meeting-is-worth-a-thousand-words-2c7213b12fb6. a New York Times op-ed: Grant, Adam. “What Straight-A Students Get Wrong.” New York Times. New York Times, December 8, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/opinion/college-gpa-career-success.html?module=inline. Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million: Hensley-Clancy, Molly. “What Happened to the $100 Million Mark Zuckerberg Gave to Newark Schools?” BuzzFeed News. BuzzFeed News, October 8, 2015. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mollyhensleyclancy/what-happened-to-zuckerbergs-100-million. a 2017 AP investigation found: Flaccus, Gillian, and Geoff Mulvihill. “Amid Booming Economy, Homelessness Soars on US West Coast.”

Atlantic Media Company, June 13, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/how-amazon-helped-kill-a-seattle-tax-on-business/562736. tens of billions: Honan, Mat, and Alex Kantrowitz. “Mark Zuckerberg Has Baby and Says He Will Give Away 99% of His Facebook Shares.” BuzzFeed News. BuzzFeed News, December 1, 2015. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mathonan/mark-zuckerberg-has-baby-and-says-he-will-give-away-99-of-hi. Amazon AI tool gone bad: Dastin, Jeffrey. “Amazon Scraps Secret AI Recruiting Tool That Showed Bias Against Women.” Reuters. Thomson Reuters, October 9, 2018. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G.


pages: 328 words: 84,682

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

utm_medium=organic&utm_source=google_rich_qa&utm_campaign=google_rich_qa (accessed May 21, 2018). 7.Yoffie and Cusumano, Strategy Rules, 114. 8.Mathew Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook’s Role in Data Misuse Sets Off a Storm on Two Continents,” New York Times, March 18, 2018; and Katrin Benhold, “Germany Acts to Tame Facebook, Learning from Its Own History of Hate,” New York Times, May 19, 2018. 9.Politico Staff, “Full Text: Mark Zuckerberg’s Wednesday Testimony to Congress on Cambridge Analytica,” Politico, April 11, 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/09/transcript-mark-zuckerberg-testimony-to-congress-on-cambridge-analytica-509978 (accessed May 15, 2018). 10.See “List of Unicorn Start-Up Companies,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unicorn_start-up_companies (accessed May 21, 2018). 11.Brian X.

See also Jack Nicas, “Alex Jones and Infowars Content Is Removed from Apple, Facebook and YouTube,” New York Times, August 6, 2018. 17.Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, “Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook—and the World,” Wired, February 12, 2018. 18.Ibid. 19.John Reed, “Hate Speech, Atrocities, and Fake News: The Crisis of Democracy in Myanmar,” Financial Times, February 21, 2018; on Sri Lanka, see Amanda Taub and Max Fisher, “Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match,” New York Times, April 21, 2018. 20.Thompson and Vogelstein, “Inside the Two Years.” 21.Ibid. 22.Rob Price, “Facebook Is Asking Users to Pick Which News Outlets Are ‘Trustworthy’—and Will Demote the Losers in Your Feed,” Business Insider, January 19, 2018. 23.Issie Lapowsky, “Facebook’s Election Safeguards Are Still a Work in Progress,” Wired, March 29, 2018. 24.Nicholas Thompson, “Mark Zuckerberg Talks to Wired about Facebook’s Privacy Problem,” Wired, March 21, 2018. 25.Reynolds, “When Digital Platforms Become Censors.” 26.Ibid. 27.“Top Facebook Executive Defended Data Collection in 2016 Memo—and Warned That Facebook Could Get People Killed,” BuzzFeed News, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data#.iuq17wEa9 (accessed August 20, 2018). 28.Hannah Kuchler, “Inside Facebook’s Content Clean-up Operation,” Financial Times, April 24, 2018; and “Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate Hearing,” Washington Post, April 10, 2018. 29.Jen Kirby, “9 Questions About Facebook and Data Sharing You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask,” Vox, April 10, 2018. 30.Kevin Roose, “How Facebook’s Data Sharing Went from a Feature to a Bug,” New York Times, March 19, 2018. 31.Thompson, “Mark Zuckerberg Talks.” 32.Reynolds, “When Digital Platforms Become Censors.” 33.Elaine Pofeldt, “Are We Ready for a Workforce That Is 50% Freelance?”

Then the rising number of PC users using the same technology created demand for programmers to design increasing numbers of compatible software applications. Who won and who lost depended less on product quality or features and more on who could best bring multiple “sides” of the emerging market together and generate positive “feedback loops.” Fast-forward to April 2018. Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder and CEO of Facebook, was on the hot seat, testifying before the U.S. Congress. His company, established in 2004, started out by building a simple personal computer application accessed via the web. By 2018, Zuckerberg’s free software and services enabled more than 2.2 billion people to send messages, share news stories or digital content like photos and videos, organize groups, send money, and do a myriad of other activities with friends, relatives, and acquaintances, as well as business partners and customers.


pages: 309 words: 81,243

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

Scott Shackford, “Senator Feinstein’s Threat to ‘Do Something’ to Social Media Companies Is a Bigger Danger to Democracy Than Russia,” Reason.com, November 3, 2017, https://reason.com/2017/11/03/sen-feinsteins-threat-to-do-something-to/. 24. Kurt Wagner, “Mark Zuckerberg says it’s ‘crazy’ to think fake news stories got Trump elected,” Vox.com, November 11, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/11/11/13596792/facebook-fake-news-mark-zuckerberg-donald-trump. 25. Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook.com, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10103508221158471/?pnref=story. 26. “Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate hearing,” WashingtonPost.com, April 10, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10/transcript-of-mark-zuckerbergs-senate-hearing/. 27.

Kara Swisher of The New York Times spends her column space, day after day, attempting to pressure Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook to set restrictive content regulations in violation of free speech principles. “Mr. Zuckerberg,” Swisher wrote in June 2020, “has become—unwittingly or not—the digital equivalent of a supercharged enabler because of his enormous power over digital communications that affect billions of people.” And, Swisher added, Zuckerberg shouldn’t worry about free speech as a value—after all, the First Amendment doesn’t mention “Facebook, or any other company. And there’s no mention of Mark Zuckerberg, who certainly has the power to rein in speech that violates company rules.”

Tony Romm, “Zuckerberg: Standing for Voice and Expression,” WashingtonPost.com, October 17, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerberg-standing-voice-free-expression/. 28. Alison Durkee, “Jack Dorsey Sees a ‘Major Gap and Flaw’ in Mark Zuckerberg’s Free Speech Argument,” VanityFair.com, October 25, 2019, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/jack-dorsey-mark-zuckerberg-free-speech-political-ads-facebook. 29. Sara Rimer, “Jack Dorsey, Twitter and Square Cofounder, Donates $10 Million to BU Center for Antiracist Research,” BU.edu, August 20, 2020, https://www.bu.edu/articles/2020/jack-dorsey-bu-center-for-antiracist-research-gift/. 30.


pages: 304 words: 91,566

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

I could never have guessed that one day I would revisit two of the characters from that story—Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the identical twins who challenged Mark Zuckerberg over the origins of what would soon be one of the most powerful companies on Earth. In the world The Accidental Billionaires was published into, Facebook was the revolution, and Mark Zuckerberg the revolutionary. He was attempting to change the social order—how society interacted and how people met, communicated, fell in love, and lived. The Winklevoss twins were his perfect foils: buttoned-down “Men of Harvard,” privileged jocks who, in many ways easy to see, appeared to represent the “Establishment.” Today things seem different. Mark Zuckerberg is a household name.

“We sure are,” Cameron said. “Um, wow. Cool. I’m Dustin Moskovitz.” If Cameron didn’t know the face, he certainly knew the name. Moskovitz had cofounded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, and had been his number two until he’d left the company in 2008 to start his own business, Asana, a software-service company that helped teams work more efficiently. Forbes had named Moskovitz the youngest self-made billionaire in history, because he was eight days younger than Mark Zuckerberg and owned more than 2 percent of Facebook. They had attended Harvard together but had traveled in very different circles. Cameron had never met Moskovitz and wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a lineup.

If you see me going for his throat, do me a favor and aim for the blazer. It’s my brother’s.” Neither the lawyer nor the mediator cracked even the slightest of smiles. * * * Walking into the fishbowl forty minutes later was one of the most surreal moments in Cameron Winklevoss’s life. Mark Zuckerberg was already seated at the long, rectangular table in the center of the room. It seemed to Cameron that his five-foot-seven-inch frame was propped up on a thick extra cushion placed on his chair—a billionaire’s booster seat. Cameron felt vaguely self-conscious as he closed the glass door behind him; he could see Tyler and his lawyer taking seats directly behind him on the other side of the glass.


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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

“Facebook (FB) Mark Elliot Zuckerberg on Q1 2016 Results—Earnings Call Transcript,” Seeking Alpha, April 28, 2016, https://seekingalpha.com/article/3968783-facebook-fb-mark-elliot-zuckerberg-q1-2016-results-earnings-call-transcript. 14. Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634. 15. Mark Zuckerberg, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote at F8 2017 Conference (Full Transcript),” April 19, 2017, https://singjupost.com/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerbergs-keynote-at-f8-2017-conference-full-transcript. 16. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” German Stories at Virginia Commonwealth University, 1797, http://germanstories.vcu.edu/goethe/zauber_e4.html. 17.

Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 2006), 99. 56. Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634. 57. Karissa Bell, “Zuckerberg Removed a Line About Monitoring Private Messages from His Facebook Manifesto,” Mashable, February 16, 2017, http://mashable.com/2017/02/16/mark-zuckerberg-manifesto-ai. 58. Heather Kelly, “Mark Zuckerberg Explains Why He Just Changed Facebook’s Mission,” CNNMoney, June 22, 2017, http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/22/technology/facebook-zuckerberg-interview/index.html. 59.

Larry Page, “2013 Google I/O Keynote,” Google I/O, May 15, 2013, http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038841/hello-larry-googles-page-on-negativity-laws-and-competitors.html. 10. “Facebook’s (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Q4 2014 Results—Earnings Call Transcript,” Seeking Alpha, January 29, 2015, https://seekingalpha.com/article/2860966-facebooks-fb-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-on-q4-2014-results-earnings-call-transcript. 11. See Ashlee Vance, “Facebook: The Making of 1 Billion Users,” Bloomberg.com, October 4, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-10-04/face book-the-making-of-1-billion-users. 12. “Facebook’s (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Q4 2014 Results.” 13. “Facebook (FB) Mark Elliot Zuckerberg on Q1 2016 Results—Earnings Call Transcript,” Seeking Alpha, April 28, 2016, https://seekingalpha.com/article/3968783-facebook-fb-mark-elliot-zuckerberg-q1-2016-results-earnings-call-transcript. 14.


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The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

Wired Staff, “May 26, 1995: Gates, Microsoft Jump on ‘Internet Tidal Wave,’ ” Wired, May 26, 2021, accessed January 5, 2022, https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/. 14. CNBC, “Microsoft’s Ballmer Not Impressed with Apple iPhone,” January 17, 2007, accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.cnbc.com/id/16671712. 15. Drew Olanoff, “Mark Zuckerberg: Our Biggest Mistake Was Betting Too Much On HTML5,” TechCrunch, September 11, 2022, accessed January 5, 2022, https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/. 16. M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 155. Chapter 3 A Definition (Finally) 1.

Throughout that summer, competing efforts from billionaires Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos were under way to bring civilian travel to lower orbit and usher in an era of space elevators and interplanetary colonization. However, it was another decades-old science fiction concept, the Metaverse, that seemed to indicate the future had truly arrived. In July 2021, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “In this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company. And obviously, all of the work that we’re doing across the apps that people use today contribute directly to this vision.”1 Shortly thereafter, Zuckerberg publicly announced a division focused on the Metaverse and elevated the head of Facebook Reality Labs—a division that works on miscellaneous futuristic projects including Oculus VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality) glasses, and brain-to-machine interfaces—to chief technology officer.

No surprise, Microsoft already had a “technology stack”2 which was a “natural fit” for the not-quite-here Metaverse and spanned the company’s operating system Windows, cloud computing offering Azure, communications platform Microsoft Teams, augmented reality headset HoloLens, gaming platform Xbox, professional network LinkedIn, and Microsoft’s own “Metaverses” including Minecraft, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and even the space-faring first-person shooter Halo.3 Mark Zuckerberg’s articulation focused on immersive virtual reality#x2021;‡ as well as social experiences that connect individuals who live far apart. Notably, Facebook’s Oculus division is the market leader in VR in both unit sales and investment, while its social network is the largest and most used globally.


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Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

“When I was a kid”: Will Drabold, “Read Peter Thiel’s Speech at the Republican National Convention,” Time, July 21, 2016, http://time.com/4417679/republican-convention-peter-thiel-transcript. “We care deeply about diversity”: Jeff John Roberts, “Mark Zuckerberg Says Trump Supporter Peter Thiel Still Has a Place on Facebook’s Board,” Fortune, Oct. 19, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/10/19/zuckerberg-thiel. “I think you need”: Melanie Ehrenkranz, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Defense of Peter Thiel Reveals a Flawed Understanding of Diversity,” Mic, March 14, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerbergs-defense-of-peter-thiel-reveals-a-flawed-understanding-of-diversity-2017-3. “whole, you know, age of computer”: Jeremy Diamond, “Trump, the Computer and Email Skeptic-in-Chief,” CNN, Dec. 30, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/29/politics/donald-trump-computers-internet-email/index.html.

It matters that there aren’t enough women in engineering. It matters that there aren’t enough women CEOs. It matters that there aren’t enough women VCs. It matters that there isn’t enough of a track record of entrepreneurs to fund,” she told me. “Everyone is looking for the next Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg. There’s pattern matching that goes on there, and they don’t look like you and they don’t look like me.” The absence of women in tech has real effects. “The best technology and the best products are built by people who have really diverse perspectives,” Marissa Mayer, the former Yahoo CEO, told me.

Silicon Valley was resurrected as the dream destination where entrepreneurs—who fit a certain stereotype—could become millionaires overnight and lower-level employees could get rich simply by picking the right company to join. Tales of enormous fortunes spread, igniting yet another California gold rush. In 2010, the movie The Social Network further glamorized start-up life and established Mark Zuckerberg as the exemplum of what a successful founder looked like. And the men flocking to the epicenter of technology continued to vastly outnumber women. Today, it’s estimated there are more than half a million unfilled tech jobs, a number that is expected to balloon to one million by 2020. The industry is facing a labor crisis much bigger than that of the 1960s, when Cannon and Perry canonized nerds as the ideal hires.


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Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

“just too creepy, too stalker-esque”: Brenton Thornicroft, “Something to Consider before You Complain about Facebook’s News Feed Updates,” Forbes, April 2, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/04/02/something-to-consider-before-you-complain-about-facebooks-news-feed-updates/#7154da847938. “you control of them”: Mark Zuckerberg, “An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg,” Facebook, September 8, 2006, accessed September 18, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/an-open-letter-from-mark-zuckerberg/2208562130/. for each American: Evan Asano, “How Much Time Do People Spend on Social Media?,” SocialMediaToday, January 4, 2017, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/how-much-time-do-people-spend-social-media-infographic.

v=64AaXC00bkQ; TechCrunch, TechFellow Awards: Ruchi Sanghvi, TechCrunch video, 4:40, March 4, 2012, https://techcrunch.com/video/techfellow-awards-ruchi-sanghvi/517287387/; FWDus2, Ruchi’s Story, YouTube, 1:24, May 10, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i86ibVt1OMM.; all videos accessed August 16, 2018. did a keg stand: Clare O’Connor, “Video: Mark Zuckerberg in 2005, Talking Facebook (While Dustin Moskovitz Does a Keg Stand),” Forbes, August 15, 2011, accessed October 7, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2011/08/15/video-mark-zuckerberg-in-2005-talking-facebook-while-dustin-moskovitz-does-a-keg-stand/#629cb86571a5. “anything you can find on the web”: Ruchi Sanghvi, “Facebook Gets a Facelift,” Facebook, September 5, 2006, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/facebook-gets-a-facelift/2207967130/.

what you already “liked”: Clive Thompson, “Social Networks Must Face Up to Their Political Impact,” Wired, February 5, 2017, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.wired.com/2017/01/social-networks-must-face-political-impact. “divisiveness and isolation”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634/. “eating the world”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.


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The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Wagner, “Number of General Motors employees between FY 2010 and FY 2018,” Statista, February 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/239843/employees-of-general-motors/; Lockheed Martin, “About Lockheed Martin,” https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are.html; Jan Conway, “Number of Employees Kroger 2014–2018,” Statista, April 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/717646/kroger-number-employees/; Home Depot, “About Home Depot,” https://corporate.homedepot.com/about. 9 Nikhil Swaminathan, “Inside the Growing Guest Worker Program Trapping Indian Students in Virtual Servitude,” Mother Jones, September/October 2017, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/inside-the-growing-guest-worker-program-trapping-indian-students-in-virtual-servitude. 10 Annalee Newitz, “Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto is a political trainwreck,” Ars Technica, February 18, 2017, https://arstechnica.com/staff/2017/02/op-ed-mark-zuckerbergs-manifesto-is-a-political-trainwreck/; Ezra Klein, “Mark Zuckerberg’s theory of human history,” Vox, February 18, 2017, http://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/2/18/14653542/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-manifesto-sapiens. 11 Gregory Ferenstein, “The Disrupters,” City Journal, Winter 2017, https://www.city-journal.org/html/disrupters-14950.html. 12 Gregory Ferenstein, “A Lot of Billionaires Are Giving to Democrats.

Medium, February 26, 2016, https://medium.com/@ferenstein/a-lot-of-billionaires-are-giving-to-democrats-here-s-a-look-at-their-agenda-b5038c2ecb34. 13 Todd Haselton, “Mark Zuckerberg joins Silicon Valley bigwigs in calling for government to give everybody free money,” Yahoo, May 25, 2017, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-joins-silicon-valley-202800717.html; Patrick Gillespie, “Mark Zuckerberg supports universal basic income. What is it?” CNN, May 6, 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/26/news/economy/mark-zuckerberg-universal-basic-income/index.html; Chris Weller, “Elon Musk doubles down on universal basic income: ‘It’s going to be necessary,’” Business Insider, February 13, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-universal-basic-income-2017-2; Patrick Caughill, “Another Silicon Valley Exec Joins the Ranks of Universal Basic Income Supporters,” Futurism, September 8, 2017, https://futurism.com/another-silicon-valley-exec-joins-the-ranks-of-universal-basic-income-supporters; Sam Altman, “Moving Forward on Basic Income,” Y Combinator, May 31, 2016, https://blog.ycombinator.com/moving-forward-on-basic-income/; Diane Francis, “The Beginning of the End of Work,” American Interest, March 19, 2018, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/03/19/beginning-end-work/. 14 “The YIMBY Guide to Bullying and Its Results: SB 827 Goes Down in Committee,” City Watch LA, April 19, 2018, https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/los-angeles/15298-the-yimby-guide-to-bullying-and-its-results-sb-827-goes-down-in-committee; John Mirisch, “Tech Oligarchs and the California Housing Crisis,” California Political Review, April 15, 2018, http://www.capoliticalreview.com/top-stories/tech-Oligarchs-and-the-california-housing-crisis/; Joel Kotkin, “Giving Common Sense a Chance in California,” City Journal, April 26, 2018, https://www.city-journal.org/html/giving-common-sense-chance-california-15868.html. 15 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans.

Cities Have a Glut of High-Rises and Still Lack Affordable Housing,” New Geography, September 3, 2017, http://www.newgeography.com/content/005732-us-cities-have-a-glut-of-high-rises-and-still-lack-affordable-housing. 13 Erika Riggs, “Mark Zuckerberg spends $30 million on four homes to ensure privacy,” NBC News, October 12, 2013, https://www.nbcnews.com/business/real-estate/mark-zuckerberg-spends-30-million-four-homes-ensure-privacy-f8C11379396; Melia Robinson, “We scouted the homes of the top tech executives, and they all live in this San Francisco suburb for the1%,” Business Insider, October 7, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/homes-of-tech-ceos-in-atherton-silicon-valley-2017-10; Meredith Bauer, “8 Amazing Homes of Silicon Valley’s Tech Elite,” The Street, May 23, 2015, https://www.thestreet.com/story/13160991/1/8-amazing-homes-of-silicon-valleys-tech-elite.html#3. 14 Veena Dubal, “Google as a landlord?


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The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

execbios. 178 “come to Google because they choose to”: Greg Jarboe, “A ‘Fireside Chat’ with Google’s Sergey Brin,” Search Engine Watch, Oct. 16, 2003, accessed Dec. 16,2010, http://searchenginewatch.com/3081081. 178 “the future will be personalized”: Gord Hotckiss, “Just Behave: Google’s Marissa Mayer on Personalized Search,” Searchengineland, Feb. 23, 2007, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://searchengineland.com/just-behave-googles-marissa-mayer-on-personalized-search-10592. 179 “It’s technology, not business or government”: David Kirpatrick, “With a Little Help from his Friends,” Vanity Fair (Oct. 2010), accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/10/sean-parker-201010. 179 “seventh kingdom of life”: Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010). 180 “shirt or fleece that I own”: Mark Zuckerberg, remarks to Startup School Conference, XConomy, Oct. 18, 2010, accessed Feb. 8, 2010, www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/10/18/mark-zuckerberg-goes-to-startup-school-video//. 181 “ ‘the rest of the world is wrong’ ”: David A. Wise and Mark Malseed, The Google Story (New York: Random House, 2005), 42. 182 “tradeoffs with success in other domains”: Jeffrey M. O’Brien, “The PayPal Mafia,” Fortune, Nov. 14, 2007, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/13/magazines/fortune/paypal_mafia.fortune/index2.htm. 183 sold to eBay for $1.5 billion: Troy Wolverton, “It’s official: eBay Weds PayPal,” CNET News, Oct. 3, 2002, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://news.cnet.com/Its-official-eBay-weds-PayPal/2100-1017_3-960658.html. 183 “impact and force change”: Peter Thie, “Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, Apr. 13, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-education-of-a-libertarian. 183 “end the inevitability of death and taxes”: Chris Baker, “Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap,” Wired, Jan. 19, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/17-02/mf_seasteading?

http://us.penguingroup.com To my grandfather, Ray Pariser, who taught me that scientific knowledge is best used in the pursuit of a better world. And to my community of family and friends, who fill my bubble with intelligence, humor, and love. INTRODUCTION A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. —Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. —Marshall McLuhan, media theorist Few people noticed the post that appeared on Google’s corporate blog on December 4, 2009. It didn’t beg for attention—no sweeping pronouncements, no Silicon Valley hype, just a few paragraphs of text sandwiched between a weekly roundup of top search terms and an update about Google’s finance software.

For a quickly rising percentage of us, personalized news feeds like Facebook are becoming a primary news source—36 percent of Americans under thirty get their news through social networking sites. And Facebook’s popularity is skyrocketing worldwide, with nearly a million more people joining each day. As founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to brag, Facebook may be the biggest source of news in the world (at least for some definitions of “news”). And personalization is shaping how information flows far beyond Facebook, as Web sites from Yahoo News to the New York Times–funded startup News.me cater their headlines to our particular interests and desires.


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Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

One billionaire in particular took a prominent and public role in the effort. And it was his money that enabled these far-left groups to embed within the voting system itself. That billionaire was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. * * * “At Facebook, we took our responsibility to protect the integrity of this election very seriously.… We’ve built sophisticated systems to protect against election interference,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told ABC News shortly after the election. He highlighted his censorship work, which he described as a fight against “misinformation.”90 Zuckerberg didn’t just help Democrats by censoring their political opponents.

Sheera Frenkel, “Renegade Facebook Employees Form Task Force to Battle Fake News,” BuzzFeed, November 14, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sheerafrenkel/renegade-facebook-employees-form-task-force-to-battle-fake-n. 6. Sam Levin, “Mark Zuckerberg: I Regret Ridiculing Fears over Facebook’s Effect on Election,” The Guardian, September 27, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-2016-election-fake-news. 7. Michael Nunez, “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News,” Gizmodo, May 9, 2016, https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006. 8.

Kirsten Grind and Keach Hagey, “Why Did Facebook Fire a Top Executive? Hint: It Had Something to Do with Trump,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-did-facebook-fire-a-top-executive-hint-it-had-something-to-do-with-trump-1541965245. 39. “Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate Hearing,” Washington Post, April 10, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10/transcript-of-mark-zuckerbergs-senate-hearing/. 40. Grind and Hagey, “Why Did Facebook.” 41. Dartunorro Clark, “Twitter Fact Checks Trump’s Tweets for the First Time, Calls Mail-In Voting Claim ‘Misleading,’ ” NBC News, May 26, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/twitter-fact-checks-trump-s-misleading-tweet-mail-voting-n1215151. 42.


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Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

After reposting the image and criticizing Facebook’s decision, Egeland was suspended twice, first for twenty-four hours, then for three additional days.1 Norway’s daily newspaper Aftenposten then reported on his suspensions and included the photo; Facebook moderators subsequently instructed the newspaper to remove or pixelate the photo, then went ahead and deleted it anyway.2 The editor in chief of Aftenposten took to the newspaper’s front page to express his outrage at Facebook’s decision, again publishing the photo along with a statement directed at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Front page of the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, September 8, 2016, including the “Terror of War” photograph (by Nick Ut / Associated Press) and editor in chief Espen Egil Hansen’s open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, critical of Facebook’s removal of Ut’s photo. Newspaper used with permission from Aftenposten; photo used with permission from Associated Press. In it he criticized both the decision and Facebook’s undue influence on news, calling Facebook “the world’s most powerful editor.”3 Many Norwegian readers, even the prime minister of Norway herself, reposted the photo to Facebook, only to have it quickly removed.4 More than a week after the image was first removed, after a great deal of global news coverage critical of the decision, Facebook reinstated the photo.

NOTES CHAPTER 1 ALL PLATFORMS MODERATE 1Mark Scott and Mike Isaac, “Facebook Restores Iconic Vietnam War Photo It Censored for Nudity,” New York Times, September 9, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/technology/facebook-vietnam-war-photo-nudity.html. 2Olivia Blair, “The Iconic Picture Causing Huge Problems for Mark Zuckerberg,” Independent, September 9, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-accused-abusing-power-napalm-girl-vietnam-war-image-a7233431.html. 3Espen Egil Hansen, “Dear Mark. I Am Writing This to Inform You That I Shall Not Comply with Your Requirement to Remove This Picture,” Aftenposten, September 8, 2016, https://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentar/Dear-Mark-I-am-writing-this-to-inform-you-that-I-shall-not-comply-with-your-requirement-to-remove-this-picture-604156b.html. 4Kelly Kiveash, “Censorship Row: Facebook Reinstates Iconic ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo,” Ars Technica, September 9, 2016, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/facebook-napalm-girl-photo-censorship-norway/. 5Justin Osofsky, Facebook, September 9, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/josofsky/posts/10157347245570231. 6Hariman and Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory,” 41. 7A National Public Radio reporter claimed that the photo was not identified algorithmically, but I also saw reports that suggested that it was.

In Yoree Koh and Reed Albergotti, “Twitter Faces Free-Speech Dilemma,” Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-is-walking-a-fine-line-confronted-with-grisly-images-1408659519. 19Adrian Chen, “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed,” Wired, October 23, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/; Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly, “The Secret Rules of the Internet,” Verge, April 13, 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderator-history-youtube-facebook-reddit-censorship-free-speech; Sarah Roberts, “Social Media’s Silent Filter,” Atlantic, March 8, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/commercial-content-moderation/518796/. 20Aarti Shahani, “From Hate Speech to Fake News: The Content Crisis Facing Mark Zuckerberg,” NPR All Tech Considered, November 17, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/17/495827410/from-hate-speech-to-fake-news-the-content-crisis-facing-mark-zuckerberg. 21Adrian Chen, “The Human Toll of Protecting the Internet from the Worst of Humanity,” New Yorker, January 28, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-human-toll-of-protecting-the-internet-from-the-worst-of-humanity. 22Julia Floretti and Yn Chee, “Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Microsoft Back EU Hate Speech Rules,” Reuters, May 31, 2016, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-facebook-twitter-hatecrime-idUSKCN0YM0VJ. 23Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly, “The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned against Women,” Atlantic, October 9, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/the-unsafety-net-how-social-media-turned-against-women/381261/. 24Mary Gray, “Your Job Is about to Get ‘Taskified,’” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0110-digital-turk-work-20160110-story.html. 25Adrian Chen, “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed,” Wired, October 23, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/; Quentin Hardy, “Spot Pornography on Facebook for a Quarter-Cent an Image,” New York Times, December 5, 2011, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/spot-porn-on-facebook-for-a-quarter-cent-an-image/. 26Hope Reese and Nick Heath, “Inside Amazon’s Clickworker Platform: How Half a Million People Are Being Paid Pennies to Train AI,” TechRepublic, 2016, http://www.techrepublic.com/article/inside-amazons-clickworker-platform-how-half-a-million-people-are-training-ai-for-pennies-per-task/. 27Irani, “The Cultural Work of Microwork,” 726. 28Ibid., 725. 29Roberts, “Commercial Content Moderation.” 30Brad Stone, “Concern for Those Who Screen the Web for Barbarity,” New York Times, July 18, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html. 31Reyhan Harmanci, “Tech Confessional: The Googler Who Looked at the Worst of the Internet,” Buzzfeed, August 21, 2012, https://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/tech-confessional-the-googler-who-looks-at-the-wo. 32Adrian Chen, “Facebook Releases New Content Guidelines, Now Allows Bodily Fluids,” Gawker, February 16, 2012, http://gawker.com/5885836/. 33Gray, “Your Job Is about to Get ‘Taskified.’” 34Downey, “Making Media Work.” 35Roberts, “Content Moderation.” 36Roberts, “Commercial Content Moderation.” 37Postigo, “America Online Volunteers.” 38Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace.” 39Dutton, “Network Rules of Order.” 40Bergstrom, “‘Don’t Feed the Troll’”; Lampe and Resnick, “Slash (Dot) and Burn”; Kerr and Kelleher, “The Recruitment of Passion and Community”; Shaw and Hill, “Laboratories of Oligarchy?”


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Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

What Kalanick was describing, without realizing it, was a proto-version of Napster, the iconic file-sharing network co-founded by Sean Parker, an internet entrepreneur and, later, an early advisor to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. Eventually, Kalanick joined six of his friends to build Scour.net, a Google-like search engine that gave users the ability to “scour” millions of files and then download them, like Napster. Kalanick later claimed to be a co-founder, though his friends disputed this status. Eventually, Kalanick was tasked with Scour’s sales and marketing efforts. By his senior year, Kalanick decided to drop out of UCLA to work on Scour full time, following the example of entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and, later, Mark Zuckerberg. It upset his parents, though they wouldn’t tell him as much until years later.

Fast-rising rents pushed wage earners out of San Francisco, while landlords flipped those former apartments to new, wealthier tenants. The “gig economy” unleashed by companies like Uber, Instacart, TaskRabbit, and DoorDash spurred an entirely new class of workers—the blue-collar techno-laborer. With the rise of Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Snapchat, venture capitalists looked everywhere to fund the next Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, or Evan Spiegel—the newest brilliant mind who sought, in the words of Steve Jobs, to “make a dent in the universe.” And as more money flowed into the Valley from outside investors—from hedge funds and private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds and Hollywood celebrities—the balance of power shifted from those who held the purse strings to the founders who brought the bright ideas and willingness to execute them.

Slashing interest rates to save the banks would have profound effects on technologists and entrepreneurs—particularly on a fifty-mile stretch of Route 101 in Northern California. In a way, the carnage of the dot-com bust had done the Valley more good than ill. The bust separated the dot-com poseurs from the actual valuable companies. Led by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg, a new generation of entrepreneurs seemed to understand intuitively how to harness the true power of the internet, and turn it into a profitable business. There were three important ingredients that fueled the new generation of entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg and Page. First, By 2008, more than 75 percent of American households owned computers, and unlike the 1990s and early 2000s, this mass population had access to broadband; more than half of American adults in 2008 purchased a high-speed internet connection for the home.


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Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

Nov. 10, 2010. mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-is-not-to-be-a-triumph-of-technology-but-of-humanity-biz-stone_b169. 6 Apple profile: “Twitter. Triumph of Humanity.” Apple. apple.com/se/business/profiles/twitter. 6 connectivity is a human right: Tamar Weinberg. “SXSW: Mark Zuckerberg Keynote (the Edited Liveblogged Version).” Techipedia. March 11, 2008. techipedia.com/2008/mark-zuckerberg-sxsw-keynote. 6 “bringing your vision to the world”: Katherine Losse. The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012, 201. 6 “we know what you like”: Alexia Tsotsis. “Eric Schmidt: ‘We Know Where You Are, We Know What You Like.’”

March 28, 2014. valleywag.gawker.com/airbnb-is-suddenly-begging-newyork-city-to-tax-its-hos-1553889167. 244 “we literally stand on the brink”: Tom Slee. “Why the Sharing Economy Isn’t.” 245 Nandini Balial background and TaskRabbit experience: Author interviews with Nandini Balial. July and August 2014. 249 “a human right”: Queena Kim. “Mark Zuckerberg: Internet Connectivity Is a Human right.” Marketplace. Aug. 21, 2013. marketplace.org/topics/tech/mark-zuckerberg-internet-connectivity-human-right. 249 “Companies are transcending power”: Kevin Roose. “The Government Shutdown Has Revealed Silicon Valley’s Dysfunction Fetish.” New York. Oct 16, 2013. nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/silicon-valleys-dysfunction-fetish.html. 250 “the paper belt”: Nick Statt.

Introduction The Ideology of Social Engineered to Like Pics or It Didn’t Happen The Viral Dream Churnalism and the Problem of Social News To Watch and Be Watched The War Against Identity The Reputation Racket Life and Work in the Sharing Economy Digital Serfdom; or, We All Work for Facebook The Myth of Privacy Big Data and the Informational Appetite Social-Media Rebellion Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Instant messages between Mark Zuckerberg and a friend after Facebook launched: Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted friend’s name]: What? How’d you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don’t know why. Zuck: They “trust me” Zuck: Dumb fucks.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Romain Dillet, “Zuckerberg Now Owns 29.3 Percent of Facebook’s Class a Shares and This Stake Is worth $13.6 Billion,” TechCrunch, February 15, 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/15/zuckerberg-now-owns-29-3-percent-of-facebook-representing-18-billion; Kroll and Dolan, “The Forbes 400,” profile no. 20, “Mark Zuckerberg, Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg. 23. David Yanofsky, “All of These Companies Have More Cash Right Now than the U.S. Government,” Quartz, October 10, 2013, http://qz.com/134093/all-of-these-companies-have-more-cash-right-now-than-the-us-government. 24. Brian Solomon, “The World’s Youngest Billionaires: 29 Under 40,” Forbes, March 4, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2013/03/04/the-worlds-youngest-billionaires-23-under-40. 25.

Blue Origin (website), http://www.blueorigin.com; Sheraz Sadiq, “Silicon Valley Goes to Space,” KQED Science (blog), November 18, 2013, http://blogs.kqed.org/science/video/silicon-valley-goes-to-space; Max Luke and Jenna Mukuno, “Boldly Going Where No Greens Have Gone Before,” Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2014. 80. Reid J. Epstein, “Mark Zuckerberg Immigration Group’s Status: Looking for Footing,” Politico, April 4, 2013, http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/mark-zuckerberg-immigration-groups-status-stumbling-89652.html. 81. Drew FitzGerald and Spencer E. Ante, “Tech Firms Push to Control Web’s Pipes,” All Things Digital, December 17, 2013, http://allthingsd.com/20131217/tech-firms-push-to-control-webs-pipes; Drew FitzGerald and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Apple Quietly Builds New Networks,” Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2014. 82.

Fredreka Schouten, “’Dark Money’ of Non-Profit Political Groups Targeted,” USA Today, June 11, 2013; Matea Gold, “Seeking to Harness Obama’s Campaign Resources for a Second Term,” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 2013; Liz Bartolomeo, “The Political Spending of 501(c)(4) Nonprofits in the 2012 Election,” Sunlight Foundation, May 21, 2013, http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/05/21/the-political-spending-of-501c4-nonprofits-in-the-2012-election; Adrian Chen, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Self-Serving Immigration Crusade,” Gawker, April 30, 2013, http://gawker.com/mark-zuckerbergs-self-serving-immigration-crusade-484912430; Chrystia Freeland, “Plutocrats vs. Populists,” New York Times, November 3, 2013; Guy Sorman, “The Philanthropic Spectacle,” City Journal, Autumn 2013; OpenSecrets.org, “Non-profits, Foundations & Philanthropists,” http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

The machinery of democracy was built during a time of nation-states, hierarchies, deference and industrialised economies. The fundamental features of digital tech are at odds with this model: non-geographical, decentralised, data-driven, subject to network effects and exponential growth. Put simply: democracy wasn’t designed for this. That’s not really anyone’s fault, not even Mark Zuckerberg’s. I’m hardly alone in thinking this, by the way. Many early digital pioneers saw how what they called ‘cyberspace’ was mismatched with the physical world, too. John Perry Barlow’s oft-quoted 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace sums up this tension rather well: ‘Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Similarly, the introduction of a ‘like’ button in 2009 came from a much older subfield of – yes, this really exists – Liking Studies, which has long shown that likability is an advert’s most potent characteristic.8 (Apparently Facebook originally planned an ‘awesome’ button.)9 Sean Parker, Facebook’s first President, recently called the ‘like’ button ‘a social-validation feedback loop . . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology’. He said that he, Mark Zuckerberg and others understood this, ‘And we did it anyway’.10 Data The Holy Grail for the social media giants, just as it always has been for all ad men, is to understand you better than you understand yourself. To predict what you will do, say and even think. Facebook doesn’t collect data about you for fun; it does it to get inside your head.

McLuhan remains a distant inspiration for Silicon Valley, one of the original thought leaders and intellectual rock stars of the tech revolution. His ‘global village’ still bounces around Palo Alto, Mountain View and Cupertino. Every time you hear talk of ‘global communities’ and ‘total connectivity’, it’s the ghost of McLuhan. ‘By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas,’ wrote Mark Zuckerberg back in the early days of his site, ‘we can decrease world conflict in the short-term and the long-term.’ McLuhan, the great prophet, was far too smart not to hedge his bets. He also said that conflict and disharmony was possible in a world where everyone was connected to everyone else, because information-at-all-times would be so discombobulating that it would spark a mass identity crisis.


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WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Bharat’s article has many additional practical suggestions for how to algorithmically detect fake news in addition to some of those that I outline in this chapter. 215 “the overall logic is the same”: Bharat, “How to Detect Fake News in Real-Time.” 217 “to make it tolerate them”: Michael Marder, “Failure of U.S. Public Secondary Schools in Mathematics,” University of Texas UTeach, retrieved April 1, 2017, https://uteach.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/BrokenEducation2011. pdf, 3. 218 work together for the common good: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634/. 219 “They have become rich because they were civic”: Robert Putnam, “The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life,” American Prospect, Spring 1993, retrieved April 1, 2017, http://prospect.org/article/prosperous-com munity-social-capital-and-public-life. 219 “for inclusion of all”: Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community.” 220 his experience with the Egyptian revolution: Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012). 221 “engage in rational discussion”: Colin Megill, “pol.is in Taiwan,” pol.is blog, May 25, 2016, https://blog.pol.is/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5. 221 “love comedies and horror but hate documentaries”: Ibid. 222 you move accordingly: “Human Spectrogram,” Knowledge Sharing Tools and Method Toolkit, wiki retrieved April 1, 2017, http://www.kstoolkit.org/Human +Spectrogram. 222 “mandatory for riders on uberX private vehicles”: Audrey Tang, “Uber Responds to vTaiwan’s Coherent Blended Volition,” pol.is blog, May 23, 2016, https://blog. pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blended-volition-3e9b75102b9b. 223 points of agreement and disagreement: Ray Dalio, TED, April 24, 2017, https://ted2017.ted.com/program. 224 “‘figure out how to get around it’”: Josh Constine, “Facebook’s New Anti-Clickbait Algorithm Buries Bogus Headlines,” TechCrunch, August 4, 2016, https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/04/facebook-clickbait/. 226 half of digital ad spending: Greg Sterling, “Search Ads Generated 50 Percent of Digital Revenue in First Half of 2016,” Search Engine Land, November 1, 2016, http://searchengineland.com/search-ads-1h-generated-16-3-billion-50-percent-total-digital-revenue-262217. 226 “We need a new model”: Evan Williams, “Renewing Medium’s Focus,” Medium, January 4, 2017, https://blog. medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be. 227 “To continue on this trajectory”: Ibid. 227 “In an experiment”: Adam D.

Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation,” Oxford Martin Institute, September 17, 2013, http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of _Employment.pdf. 299 the age of growth is over: Robert Gordon, “The Death of Innovation, the End of Growth,” TED 2013, https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_gordon _the_death_of_innovation_the_end_of _growth. 301 something that had never been done before: Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures (New York: William Morrow, 2016). 302 well-paid human jobs: Already, in the US, 43% of the electric power generation workforce is employed in solar technologies, versus 22% of electric power generation via fossil fuels. US Energy and Employment Report, Department of Energy, 2016, 28, https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/01/f34/2017%20US%20Energy%20and%20Jobs%20Report_0.pdf. 302 cure all disease within their children’s lifetimes: Mark Zuckerberg, “Can we cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime?,” Facebook post, September 21, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/can-we-cure-all-diseases-in-our-childrens-lifetime/10154087783966634/. 303 “the leading edge of who is going to create that”: Jeff Immelt, in conversation with Tim O’Reilly, Next:Economy Summit, San Francisco, November 12, 2015, https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/ges-digital-transformation. 304 it has roughly hovered since: Max Roser, “Working Hours,” OurWorldInData.org, 2016, retrieved April 4, 2017, https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours/. 304 generosity is the robust strategy: Ryan Avent, The Wealth of Humans (New York: St.

It was all about the joy of sharing our work, the rush of clicking on a link and connecting with another computer half the world away, and constructing similar destinations for our peers. We were all enthusiasts. Some of us were also entrepreneurs. To be sure, it is those entrepreneurs—people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Michael Dell in the personal computer era; Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg in the web era—who saw that this world driven by a passion for discovery and sharing could become the cradle of a new economy. They found financial backers, shaped the toy into a tool, and built the businesses that turned a movement into an industry. The lesson is clear: Treat curiosity and wonder as a guide to the future.


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Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Google remains the apex predator of this ecosystem, claiming 28.9 percent of the US digital ad market in 2020. The next-biggest player, which controls another 25.2 percent, is Facebook. Founded shortly after Google began its ad-fueled ascent, Facebook was part of a wave of startups that together came to define what we now know as “social media.” The first iteration of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation appeared in 2004, YouTube arrived in 2005 (and was purchased by Google the following year), and Twitter followed in 2006. What characterized these sites was a reliance on user- generated content. At the time, tech guru Tim O’Reilly hailed this aspect as one of the pillars of what he called “Web 2.0”: a new, more participatory web that emerged from the wreckage of the dot-com era.

Republican politicians often accuse tech companies of censoring conservative views online. Given the visibility of the Right on social media, the accusation is clearly false, but it serves a useful purpose. By complaining about anti-conservative bias, Republicans can “work the ref” and bludgeon Facebook into being even more hospitable to right-wing propaganda. It’s effective: Mark Zuckerberg has gone out of his way to curry favor with Republican leaders, and to mold Facebook’s content policies to their liking. Joel Kaplan, a high-ranking Republican within Facebook who serves as the company’s vice president of global public policy, wields particularly broad power. Kaplan has repeatedly intervened to promote the circulation of right-wing content on the site, and to push for content moderation rules and algorithm tweaks that favor the Right.

Immensely consequential decisions would be left in the hands of executives and investors, and these decisions would in turn be bound by the mandates of the market. Most people would have no say in the matters that centrally affect their lives. A privatized internet will always amount to the rule of the many by the few, and the rule of those few by an imperative that is hard-wired into capitalism: the imperative to accumulate. Mark Zuckerberg is probably the most powerful man online, thanks to a shareholder structure that preserves his control of Facebook. A social network of more than 2 billion users is more or less a personal dictatorship. But even Zuckerberg can’t defy the imperative to accumulate; shareholders would punish him in the form of a falling stock price, and, if it got bad enough, competitors would put him out of business.


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Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age by Michael Wolff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Carl Icahn, commoditize, creative destruction, digital divide, disintermediation, Golden age of television, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Joseph Schumpeter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, telemarketer, the medium is the message, vertical integration, zero-sum game

While everywhere there was the belief, near absolute, that the future of media lay with some ever-transforming technology, twenty years into this revolution, the value of traditional media, even with big losses in print and music, dramatically grew, with an Ernst & Young study in 2014 finding traditional media and entertainment companies increasing “their lead as one of the most profitable industries,” with television margins as high as almost 50 percent. And yet, at the same time, there was the unquestioned certainty that technology had fundamentally altered media behavior and scale—Mark Zuckerberg would say in late 2014 that you can’t really build a business with fewer than a billion users—and hence the nature of media leadership and economics. In fact, Matt Stone’s South Park, continuing its remarkable seventeen-year run on Comedy Central, recently made a $30 million yearly digital deal with Hulu, while Funny or Die languished.

Or, it might be because at an ultimate level of media, of strategic business decisions about it, and perhaps particularly among people in the technology business—that is, people decidedly not in the media business—it is hardly understood that there is a fundamental distinction or choice, or, more important, relationship, between fiction and nonfiction, between news and narrative, between storytelling and holding the public’s attention. Who wants to bet that such a balance, such an internal sort of algorithm, has ever crossed Mark Zuckerberg’s mind? Digital media defaulted to the belief that information was the currency: after all, the new medium could provide information faster, cheaper, and with greater individual specificity; the functional dream from the early Web and then in essence put into mass practice by Facebook and Twitter was a newspaper just for you.

Her frequent presentations at sales meetings and industry events about the Facebook experience and the Facebook environment and the Facebook uniqueness, all in the kind of language that media companies use to sell and describe themselves, is peculiarly out of kilter with how Facebook itself, at its highest levels, describes itself and with what it seems to want to be. Mark Zuckerberg is a technology-focused multibillionaire who believes his company offers a central piece of functionality in everybody’s life. He seems at best impatient with if not contemptuous of media. From the beginning of his career and the earliest days of Facebook he has made sour pronouncements about advertising, seeing it, apparently, as a transitional revenue phase for the company.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

Gigaom, April 25, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://gigaom.com/2012/04/25/ can-you-learn-to-be-as-charismatic-as-steve-jobs/. 214 I saw Mark Zuckerberg: author’s notes, World Economic Forum in Davos, 2009. 214 Mark Zuckerberg was once: Nicholas Carlson, “The Facebook Movie Is an Act of Cold-Blooded Revenge—New Unpublished IMs Tell the Real Story,” Business Insider, September 21, 2010, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/ facebook-movie-zuckerberg-ims#. 214 Zuckerberg is a master at finding: Henry Blodget, “The Maturation of the Billionaire Boy-Man,” New York magazine, May 6, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://nymag.com/news/ features/mark-zuckerberg-2012-5/. 218 In her classic book: Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way (New York: Jeremy P.

Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946). 211 When Facebook “went public”: http://stream.wsj.com/story/ facebook-ipo/SS-2-9640/, accessed September 5, 2012. 211 But in all the conversation: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/ 1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm#toc287954_10, accessed September 5, 2012. 211 In his IPO letter: Ibid. 211 To ensure that sentiment: Michael Hiltzik, “Facebook Shareholders Are Wedded to the Whims of Mark Zuckerberg,” Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012—http://arti cles.latimes.com/ 2012/may/20/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20120517. 211 Of course, the subsequent IPO: Roben Farzad, “Facebook: The Stock That Keeps on Dropping,” BusinessWeek, August 2, 2012, accessed October 15, 2012, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-02/ facebook-the-stock-that-keeps-on-dropping; Jessica Guynn, “Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg Won’t Sell Stock for at Least One Year,” Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2012, accessed October 15, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/04/ business/la-fi-tn-facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-wont-sell-stock-for-at-least-one-year-20120904. 212 From the 1920s through much: Rakesh Khurana, interviews with author; Roger Martin, conversations with author; Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 212 Back in 2004, when Sergey: http://investor.google.com/corporate/ 2004/ipo-founders-letter.html, accessed September 5, 2012. 212 “Sergey and I founded Google”: Ibid. 213 Though Steve Jobs is now: Olivia Fox Cabane, “Can You Learn to Be as Charismatic as Steve Jobs?”

That’s where immersion comes in. IMMERSION It would be a fool’s errand to attempt to embody the dreams and aspirations of every culture. But not all of us want to remain in the culture we were born into. We want to explore new places, meet new people, and try out new ways of life. For every Mark Zuckerberg who built a new company upon the values of his generation, there are creative individuals who left their worlds behind in order to gain new skills in new areas. Howard Schultz was not born in an Italian coffee culture but traveled to Italy to learn what made it so special and then brought it back to the United States and built the coffee experience into what we know it to be today.


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Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Collins added, “We believe that in its evidence to the Committee Facebook has often deliberately sought to frustrate our work, by giving incomplete, disingenuous and at times misleading answers to our questions….Even if Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t believe he is accountable to the UK Parliament, he is to the billions of Facebook users across the world. Evidence uncovered by my Committee shows he still has questions to answer yet he’s continued to duck them, refusing to respond to our invitations directly or sending representatives who don’t have the right information. Mark Zuckerberg continually fails to show the levels of leadership and personal responsibility that should be expected from someone who sits at the top of one of the world’s biggest companies

“For the first time,” says McNamee, “I realized that Facebook’s algorithms might favour incendiary messages over neutral ones.”11 What’s more, it was becoming clear that those algorithms might be leading to a more dangerous and polarized world, not to mention a less democratic one. He decided to do something about it. In October 2016, several days before the presidential election, McNamee reached out to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. These were people that he counted as friends, and he had every reason to believe they would listen to his concerns. He was, after all, the one who had advised Mark Zuckerberg to turn down Yahoo’s $1 billion offer to buy the company early on (a smart move given its current value); he’d also been the one to suggest that Zuck hire Google ad whiz Sheryl Sandberg to be COO of the company.

Kreiss and McGregor, “Technology Firms Shape Political Communication.” 4. Ibid., 415. 5. Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?” The New Yorker, September 17, 2018. 6. Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, “Inside the Trump Bunker, With 12 Days to Go,” Bloomberg, October 27, 2016. 7. Mueller, Robert S., III, “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election,” Homeland Security Digital Library, March 2019, https://www.hsdl.org/​?abstract&did=824221. 8. Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?” 9. McNamee, Zucked, 7–8. 10.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

In those early months the site’s server space was paid for by a wealthy roommate and, at one particularly cash-strapped point, by Zuckerberg’s parents. It seemed unlikely to become the next world-changing tech company.19 That was, of course, before Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates moved to Palo Alto, secured money and mentorship, and became the runaway start-up success story of the decade, fodder for countless magazine cover stories, books, and one big-studio Hollywood film. Tech investors (and tech journalists) were perpetually seeking the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg fit the bill—extraordinarily driven, far-seeing, his technologist’s eyes on the prize even before he reached the legal drinking age.

Rusli, “In Flip-Flops and Jeans, An Unconventional Venture Capitalist,” DealBook blog, The New York Times, October 6, 2011, https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/in-flip-flops-and-jeans-the-unconventional-venture-capitalist/, archived at https://perma.cc/C7X7-KWJ2; Eugene Kim, “Early Facebook Executive on Mark Zuckerberg,” Business Insider, November 23, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/chamath-palihapitiya-on-mark-zuckerberg-2014-11, archived at https://perma.cc/9CLK-S8RS [inactive]. 25. Caroline McCarthy, “Facebook f8: One Graph to Rule them All,” CNET, April 21, 2010, https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-f8-one-graph-to-rule-them-all/, archived at https://perma.cc/W4T5-49CM.

As Facebook’s user base skyrocketed and “like” buttons metastasized around the Web, the company attracted the attention of the FTC, which required Facebook to adopt stricter and more transparent privacy standards (Federal Trade Commission, Decision and Order in the Matter of Facebook, Inc., Docket No. C-4365, August 10, 2012). 26. Nick Bilton, “A Walk in the Woods with Mark Zuckerberg,” The New York Times, July 7, 2011, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/a-walk-in-the-woods-with-mark-zuckerberg/, archived at https://perma.cc/86DU-LAWF. 27. Heather Brown, Emily Guskin, and Amy Mitchell, “The Role of Social Media in the Arab Uprisings,” Pew Research Center, November 28, 2012; Benjamin Gleason, “#Occupy Wall Street: Exploring Informal Learning About a Social Movement on Twitter,” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 7 (2013): 966–82; André Brock, “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56, no. 4 (2012): 529–49; Russell Rickford, “Black Lives Matter: Toward a Modern Practice of Mass Struggle,” New Labor Forum 25, no. 1 (2016): 34–42. 28.


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Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance by Matthew Brennan

Airbnb, AltaVista, augmented reality, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, ImageNet competition, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, paypal mafia, Pearl River Delta, pre–internet, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WeWork, Y Combinator

2018-09-05 https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/vine-and-musical-ly-transformed-the-music-industry-then-they-disappeared-will-history-repeat-itself/ Musical.ly has lots of users, not much ad traction 2017-09-05 https://digiday.com/marketing/musical-ly-starts-selling-ads/ Decoding the Global Rise of TikTok 2020-02-23 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/decoding-global-rise-tiktok-ruonan-deng/ 对话 Musical.ly投资人:曾有人出价 15亿美金,但头条变现体系强 2017-11-19 http://tech.sina.com.cn/roll/2017-11-19/doc-ifynwnty4928120.shtml Visiting Musical.ly HQ in Shanghai | Shanghai Vlog 2017-10-17 https://youtu.be/F9EPQD9Zikg?t=352 Chapter 8: CRINGE!!! Evan Spiegel interview at DLD Conference Munich 20 2020-01-20 https://youtu.be/rW8mDQYrOnw?t=1877 Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s leaked internal Facebook meetings 2019-10-01 https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20892354/mark-zuckerberg-full-transcript-leaked-facebook-meetings TikTok’s Growing Pains In The West: Attack of the Memes 2018-10-16 https://medium.com/@NateyBakes/tiktoks-growing-pains-in-the-west-attack-of-the-memes-b96e26593649 TikTok is cringy and that’s fine 2018-10-25 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/what-tiktok-is-cringey-and-thats-fine/573871/ This Is What TikTok Users Think About The Internet Hating Them 2018-10-09 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/krishrach/tiktok-twitter-thread-weird TikTok surges past 6M downloads in the US as celebrities join the app 2018-11-15 https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/15/18095446/tiktok-jimmy-fallon-tony-hawk-downloads-revenue The NFL joins TikTok in multi-year partnership 2019-09-03 https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/03/the-nfl-joins-tiktok-in-multi-year-partnership/ I can’t believe this happened at a TikTok meetup 2020-01-08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?

The global landscape Applying this framework of internet informational distribution to look at the global market shortly after the founding of ByteDance reveals companies like Facebook were already embracing recommendation. “We want to give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper in the world.” 89 were the words of Mark Zuckerberg in 2013, announcing a significant set of changes to the Facebook newsfeed. The American giant saw the adoption of machine learning as central to remaining competitive. The Facebook newsfeed was already adopting sophisticated technology to recommend an optimal mix of posts from friends and family, news media, adverts, and branded content.

In contrast, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, Tencent CEO Pony Ma, Baidu CEO Robin Li, and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman stand centrally and directly behind Chinese leader Xi Jinping. 116 Yiming learned to take greater care of his appearance. Previously staff had noted, “some strands (of his hair) would stick out sometimes because of a bad sleeping posture.” 117 At one point in his earlier career, inspired by Mark Zuckerberg’s well documented, efficient dress habits, he had bought 99 identical T-Shirts of the Chinese clothing brand Vanke and worn them one after another, for 99 days. 118 Now he was clean-cut and better dressed, occasionally even wearing a suit in public. Traveling to the United States to participate in an internet industry forum Yiming was pictured sat next to Microsoft’s Bill Gates, looking at ease.


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Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Why Nietzsche Is Misunderstood,” Guardian , October 6, 2018, https:// www .theguardian .com /books /2018 /oct /06 /exploding -nietzsche -myths -need -dynamiting.   78   übermensch wannabes : Alex Ross, “Nietzsche’s Eternal Return,” New Yorker , October 4, 2019, https:// www .newyorker .com /magazine /2019 /10 /14 /nietzsches -eternal -return.   78   “I no longer believe” : Ross, “Nietzsche’s Eternal Return.”   79   “it’s hard to find actual examples” : Steven Levy, “Google’s Larry Page on Why Moon Shots Matter,” Wired , January 17, 2013, https:// www .wired .com /2013 /01 /ff -qa -larry -page /.   80   Zuckerberg told The New Yorker : Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook before It Breaks Democracy?,” New Yorker , September 10, 2018, https:// www .newyorker .com /magazine /2018 /09 /17 /can -mark -zuckerberg -fix -facebook -before -it -breaks -democracy.   81   “I don’t expect” : Rick Merritt, “Moore’s Law Dead by 2022, Expert Says,” EE Times , August 27, 2013, https:// www .eetimes .com /moores -law -dead -by -2022 -expert -says /.

As Shoshana Zuboff chronicled in her book Surveillance Capitalism , instead of simply continuing to deliver search results to users, Google got into the even more profitable business of delivering user data to its real customers—the market researchers seeking to target users and manipulate their behavior. Likewise, Mark Zuckerberg left college to pursue his (probably borrowed ) dream of building an online social network for college students to make friends and get dates. After taking capital from Peter Thiel and others, however, his business model shifted from serving ads to selling data. The longer and more emotionally engaged we are with the platform, the more Facebook can learn about us.

He creates a new world, brings his followers through a great exodus—or exit strategy—to salvation, while the rest of humanity is left behind. For all the claim to originality, many of these tech titans model themselves after historical figures they heard about before drop ping out of school. Mark Zuckerberg is famously obsessed with Roman emperor Augustus Caesar, who is often credited with developing the network of roads and the courier system through which Rome administered its imperial expansion over several centuries. “Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace,” Zuckerberg told The New Yorker .


pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

., May 4, 2017. Zuckerberg, according to a history: David Kirkpatrick, “Mark Zuckerberg: The Temptation of Facebook’s CEO,” CNN Money, May 6, 2010, https://money.cnn.com/2010/05/06/technology/facebook_excerpt_full.fortune/index.htm. Eventually Graham offered $6 million: Ibid. According to an account: Ibid. They and Zuckerberg went to: Sarah Ellison, “Ghosts in the Newsroom,” Vanity Fair, March 7, 2012, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/04/washington-post-watergate. The man persuaded: David Kirkpatrick, “Mark Zuckerberg: The Temptation of Facebook’s CEO,” CNN Money, May 6, 2010, https://money.cnn.com/2010/05/06/technology/facebook_excerpt_full.fortune/index.htm.

He would explain this watershed moment: Jonah Peretti, presentation to the University of Florida, March 2014, https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/may/12/buzzfeed-founder-quality-religions-dont-just-go-vi/. This was a welcome departure: Fred Vogelstein, “The Wired Interview: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg,” Wired, June 29, 2009, https://www.wired.com/2009/06/mark-zuckerberg-speaks/. “If I had to guess: John Cassidy, “Me Media,” New Yorker, May 15, 2006, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/05/15/me-media. Five years after its public launch: Smriti Bhagat et al., “Three and a Half Degrees of Separation,” Facebook Research, February 4, 2016, https://research.fb.com/three-and-a-half-degrees-of-separation/.

Then That Became a Liability,” Washington Post, January 22, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/inside-facebooks-year-of-reckoning/2018/01/22/cfd7307c-f4c3-11e7-beb6-c8d48830c54d_story.html?utm_term=.f7d8e787ed34; Max Read, “Does Even Mark Zuckerberg Know What Facebook Is?,” New York, October 1, 2017, http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/10/does-even-mark-zuckerberg-know-what-facebook-is.html. When the network welcomed: John Lanchester, “You Are the Product,” London Review of Books 39, no. 16 (August 17, 2017), https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/john-lanchester/you-are-the-product. Sixty-two percent of Americans: Elisa Shearer and Jeffrey Gottfried, “News Use across Social Media Platforms 2017,” Pew Research Center/Journalism.org, September 7, 2017, http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/.


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

The answer here is not to limit the market power of these platform businesses—a move that would likely diminish overall consumer welfare—but rather to address the behavior of these businesses in specific areas of concern. 5 Designing a Billion-Dollar Company How the Core Transaction Explains Tinder’s Success The trick isn’t adding stuff. It’s taking away. —Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook Now that you understand what makes a platform tick, it’s time to look at how to build one. When it comes to business model design, linear businesses have it easy. Not only is the design process much simpler, but there are established frameworks you can work within.

Another of Facebook’s early competitors was houseSYSTEM, a social network created by a Harvard senior in September 2003, a few months before Facebook was founded. HouseSYSTEM allowed Harvard students to buy and sell books and review courses, among other features. It also allowed them to upload photos to what it called a “Universal Face Book.” Sam Lessin, a classmate of Mark Zuckerberg’s who would later go on to become head of product at Facebook, remembered using houseSYSTEM. He called it “a huge sprawling system that could do all sorts of things.” A few hundred students signed up, but houseSYSTEM never got much traction. After Facebook launched, houseSYSTEM’s creator, Aaron Greenspan, met with Zuckerberg at Harvard and invited Zuckerberg to incorporate houseSYSTEM into Facebook, but Zuckerberg declined.

“Our job is to create incentives and disincentives to produce the best behavior, the best outcome, from a bunch of people you’ll never meet.” In effect, he was creating public policy for Twitter’s developer community. This attitude is surprisingly common among those who have spent time leading platforms. In fact, it was a key reason that Mark Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg as Facebook’s chief operating officer. “We spent a lot of time talking about her experience in government,” Zuckerberg said. “In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies, we’re really setting policies.”11 Sarver agrees.


pages: 460 words: 130,820

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

Adam Neumann became friends with Richards, a handsome, charismatic film buff who often stayed in the couple’s apartment. The two men spent nights downing bottles of Don Julio 1942 tequila—which retailed for more than $125 apiece—at the Waverly Inn, the scene-y West Village spot owned by Vanity Fair’s editor, Graydon Carter. Richards, in turn, introduced Neumann to Sean Parker, the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s mentor and early investor who was played by Justin Timberlake in the 2010 movie The Social Network. Neumann loved the movie. While many critics dwelled on the withering portrait of a narcissistic Zuckerberg and the cutthroat tactics he and Parker used to build Facebook—Neumann came away with a different impression.

By 2010, the herd had begun to question the traditional wisdom, influenced by a few data points that were impossible to ignore. Amazon was booming, having been led since its inception by Jeff Bezos, who had transformed the company from the plucky bookselling firm started in his garage to the world’s dominant e-commerce company. Mark Zuckerberg stayed firmly in control of Facebook, by far the most successful new tech company started in the twenty-first century. Then there was Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs, who had a cultlike following in the Valley and was in the midst of making Apple the country’s most valuable corporation. What these startups-turned-juggernauts had in common was not lost on venture capitalists: driven founders with a gift for salesmanship.

Benchmark backed both Snapchat and Uber, two companies in which the CEOs had enhanced voting power that gave them a firm grip on their companies. Amid the influx of money from mutual funds and others, the balance of power had shifted in Silicon Valley. Founders who looked and acted the part—decisive leadership, expansive vision—had plenty of sway over investors eager to place bets on the next Steve Jobs. Mark Zuckerberg had secured his control over Facebook by selling shares to Russian investors years before the IPO, in exchange for the ability to vote those shares. He also had shares with ten times the votes of a standard share. Travis Kalanick of Uber and Evan Spiegel of Snapchat struck similar arrangements.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

sequence=5&isAllowed=y. 6 Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander, “How Teens in the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News,” BuzzFeed News, November 3, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo#.fu2okXaeKo. 7 Kurt Wagner, “Mark Zuckerberg says it’s ‘crazy’ to think fake news stories got Donald Trump elected,” Recode, November 11, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/11/11/13596792/facebook-fake-news-mark-zuckerberg-donald-trump. 8 Amit Singhal, “ ‘Revenge porn’ and Search,” Google Public Policy Blog, June 19, 2015, https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2015/06/revenge-porn-and-search.html. 9 P. W. Singer and Emerson T.

Perry, “Only 52 US companies have been on the Fortune 500 since 1955, thanks to the creative destruction that fuels economic prosperity,” American Enterprise Institute, May 22, 2019, https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/only-52-us-companies-have-been-on-the-fortune-500-since-1955-thanks-to-the-creative-destruction-that-fuels-economic-prosperity/. 86 Kia Kokalitcheva, “This is the latest $1 billion tech company to IPO,” Fortune, May 20, 2015, https://fortune.com/2015/05/20/shopify-ipo-pricing/. 87 Y Charts, Shopify Market Cap, https://ycharts.com/companies/SHOP/market_cap. 88 “Mark Zuckerberg Opening Statement Transcript Antitrust Hearing July 29,” Rev, July 29, 2020, https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/mark-zuckerberg-opening-statement-transcript-antitrust-hearing-july-29. 89 Tom Wheeler, “Digital competition with China starts with competition at home,” Brookings Institution, April 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/research/digital-competition-with-china-starts-with-competition-at-home/. 90 “US Venture Capital Investment Surpasses $130 Billion in 2019 for Second Consecutive Year,” PitchBook, January 14, 2020, https://pitchbook.com/media/press-releases/us-venture-capital-investment-surpasses-130-billion-in-2019-for-second-consecutive-year. 91 “2020 Global Startup Outlook,” Silicon Valley Bank, https://www.svb.com/globalassets/library/uploadedfiles/content/trends_and_insights/reports/startup_outlook_report/suo_global_report_2020-final.pdf. 92 Mark Zuckerberg, “Hearing Before the United States House of Representatives,” Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, July 29, 2020, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20200729/110883/HHRG-116-JU05-Wstate-ZuckerbergM-20200729.pdf. 93 Jeff Desjardins, “China’s home-grown tech giants are dominating their US competitors,” Business Insider, February 7, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-home-grown-tech-giants-are-dominating-their-us-competitors-2018-2. 94 Tugba Sabanoglu, “Global market share of Amazon 2020, by region,” Statista, December 1, 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1183515/amazon-market-share-region-worldwide/. 95 Arjun Kharpal, “China’s Tencent is now bigger than Facebook after adding around $200 billion to its value this year,” CNBC, July 29, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/29/tencent-is-now-bigger-than-facebook-after-shares-surged-this-year.html. 96 Ganesh Sitaraman, “Too Big to Prevail: The National Security Case for Breaking Up Big Tech,” Foreign Affairs, March 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2020-02-10/too-big-prevail. 97 “Asymmetric Competition: A Strategy for China & Technology,” China Strategy Group, https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20463382/final-memo-china-strategy-group-axios-1.pdf. 98 “IREX Ukraine public service announcement for the Citizen Media Literacy Project (Ukrainian),” YouTube, February 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

The gold rush of 1849 had triggered the population influx that made California a state. In the early 2010s, Silicon Valley felt like a modern-day gold rush. Discoveries were bursting forth, and companies were hiring left and right. Engineers living off ramen noodles and Soylent became millionaires in a matter of months. In 2010, Time magazine named Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg its Person of the Year.7 A couple of years later, the cover of Forbes featured Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey under the headline “America’s Best Entrepreneurs.”8 When I arrived in the Bay in the summer of 2014, Airbnb, which had started six years earlier as an air mattress in its founders’ San Francisco living room, had recently closed a $475 million funding round.9 Uber had just launched Uber Pool.10 Within a year, Fitbit had IPOed.11 Palantir, the data analytics company, was valued at $20 billion.12 The term “unicorn” had originally been coined to describe the rarity of billion-dollar start-ups; by mid-2015, there were over 130 unicorns.13 By the middle of the decade, 62 percent of adult Americans were on Zuckerberg’s Facebook.14 Sleek Apple Watches started appearing on the wrists of the well connected, and Amazon Echos began dotting living rooms around the United States.


pages: 56 words: 16,788

The New Kingmakers by Stephen O'Grady

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, DevOps, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator

Steve Jobs believed that an elite talent was 25 times more valuable to Apple than an average alternative. For Jobs, this was critical to Apple’s resurgence: That’s probably…certainly the secret to my success. It’s that we’ve gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg agrees, saying in a 2010 interview: Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good. They are 100 times better. For Bill Gates, the number was 10,000 times better. If any of these assertions are even approximately correct, the cost of an elite chef or a few kegs of beer pales next to the expected return from the technical talent that these perks could potentially attract.

And when the technology is included in the transaction, it is frequently released as open source post-acquisition. The people, by contrast, are the real asset. Facebook’s 2008 acquisition of FriendFeed, for example, cost the company $50 million dollars. How did Facebook justify the acquisition? “We really wanted to get Bret [Taylor],” said Mark Zuckerberg of the man who is now Facebook’s CTO. Joe Hewitt, meanwhile, who came in the Parakey acquisition, wrote Facebook’s first iPhone application. And Gowalla’s Josh Williams is now the product manager for locations and events at Facebook. In spite of the premiums and the obvious inefficiency of practices like acqhiring, there is no evidence that the labor market will equalize in the near term.

Besides being illegal, this practice is perhaps the best indication yet of the value attached to technologists, as companies are in effect saying: “developers are so valuable we will act illegally to retain them.” The non-hiring pact seems to suggest that companies like Apple, Google, and Intel agree with the high valuation Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg place on the most skilled developers, but what about the world outside of Silicon Valley? There, too, the valuation of developers is at an all-time high. In New York City, for example, traditional financial services employers are competing with industries like advertising, healthcare, and even defense over developers with strong quantitative analysis skills.


pages: 394 words: 117,982

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

Google, meanwhile, tried a different approach: The YouTube Team, “Bringing New Redirect Method Features to YouTube,” Official YouTube Blog, July 20, 2017, youtube.googleblog.com/2017/07/bringing-new-redirect-method-features.html. “Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook”: Mark Zuckerberg, interview by David Kirkpatrick, “In Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg,” Techonomy, November 17, 2016, techonomy.com/conf/te16/videos-conversations-with-2/in-conversation-with-mark-zuckerberg/. The president took him into a private room: Adam Entous, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Craig Timberg, “Obama Tried to Give Zuckerberg a Wake-Up Call over Fake News on Facebook,” Washington Post, September 24, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-tried-to-give-zuckerberg-a-wake-up-call-over-fake-news-on-facebook/2017/09/24/15d19b12-ddac-4ad5-ac6e-ef909e1c1284_story.html?

., British Intelligence Mining Data from Nine U.S. Internet Companies in Broad Secret Program,” Washington Post, June 7, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html. Mark Zuckerberg posted a heated defense: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook post, June 7, 2013, www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100828955847631. a long history of cooperation: Julia Angwin, Charlie Savage, Jeff Larson, Henrik Moltke, Laura Poitras, James Risen, “AT&T Helped U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale,” New York Times, August 16, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-nsa-spy-on-an-array-of-internet-traffic.html.

Sanger, and Scott Shane, “The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.,” New York Times, December 13, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html. CHAPTER XI: THREE CRISES IN THE VALLEY “If you had asked me”: Kevin Roose and Sheera Frenkel, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Reckoning: ‘This Is a Major Trust Issue,’ ” New York Times, March 22, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/technology/mark-zuckerberg-q-and-a.html. Twenty minutes after: “Paris Attacks: What Happened on the Night,” BBC News, December 9, 2015, www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34818994. “be unforgiving with the barbarians from Daesh”: Adam Nossiter, Aurelien Breeden, and Katrin Bennhold, “Three Teams of Coordinated Attackers Carried Out Assault on Paris, Officials Say; Hollande Blames ISIS,” New York Times, November 15, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/world/europe/paris-terrorist-attacks.html.


pages: 241 words: 78,508

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg

affirmative action, business process, Cass Sunstein, constrained optimization, experimental economics, fear of failure, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, old-boy network, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social graph, Susan Wojcicki, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want (New York: Bantam Dell, 2008), 253. 23. For more information and advice about how to be “relentlessly pleasant,” see ibid., 251–66. 24. E. B. Boyd, “Where Is the Female Mark Zuckerberg?,” San Francisco, December 2011, http://​www.​modern​luxury.​com/​san-​francisco/​story/​where-​the-​female-​mark-​zuckerberg. 25. Jessica Valenti, “Sad White Babies with Mean Feminist Mommies,” Jessica Valenti blog, June 19, 2012, http://​jessi​cavalenti.​tumblr.​com/​post/​254655​02300/​sad-​white-​babies-​with-​mean-​feminist-​mommies-​the. 4. IT’S A JUNGLE GYM, NOT A LADDER 1.

Both male and female colleagues often resist working with a woman who has negotiated for a higher salary because she’s seen as more demanding than a woman who refrained from negotiating.17 Even when a woman negotiates successfully for herself, she can pay a longer-term cost in goodwill and future advancement.18 Regrettably, all women are Heidi. Try as we might, we just can’t be Howard. When I was negotiating with Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for my compensation, he made me an offer that I thought was fair. We had been having dinner several nights a week for more than a month and a half, discussing Facebook’s mission and his vision for the future. I was ready to accept the job. No, I was dying to accept the job. My husband, Dave, kept telling me to negotiate, but I was afraid of doing anything that might botch the deal.

We all want a job or role that truly excites and engages us. This search requires both focus and flexibility, so I recommend adopting two concurrent goals: a long-term dream and an eighteen-month plan. I could never have connected the dots from where I started to where I am today. For one thing, Mark Zuckerberg was only seven years old when I graduated from college. Also, back then, technology and I did not exactly have a great relationship. I used Harvard’s computer system only once as an undergraduate, to run regressions for my senior thesis on the economics of spousal abuse. The data was stored on large, heavy magnetic tapes that I had to lug in big boxes across campus, cursing the entire way and arriving in a sweaty mess at the sole computer center, which was populated exclusively with male students.


pages: 302 words: 74,350

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

by Zadie Smith, a British writer with a lot of eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. Zadie Smith’s essay pointed out that the questions Facebook asked of its users appeared to have been written by a twelve year old. But these questions weren’t written by a twelve year old. They were written by Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire. Mark Zuckerberg was such a billionaire that he was the boss of other billionaires. He was Sheryl Sandberg’s boss. J. Karacehennem thought that he knew something about Facebook that Zadie Smith, in her decency, hadn’t imagined. “The thing is,” said J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, “that we’ve spent like, what, two or three hundred years wrestling with existentialism, which really is just a way of asking, Why are we on this planet?

Facebook made its money through an Internet web and mobile platform which advertised cellphones, feminine hygiene products and breakfast cereals. This web and mobile platform was also a place where hundreds of millions of people offered up too much information about their personal lives. Facebook was invented by Mark Zuckerberg, who didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. What is your gender? asked Facebook. What is your relationship status? asked Facebook. What is your current city? asked Facebook. What is your name? asked Facebook. What are your favorite movies? asked Facebook. What is your favorite music?

Facebook is amazing because finally we understand why we have hometowns and why we get into relationships and why we eat our stupid dinners and why we have names and why we own idiotic cars and why we try to impress our friends. Why are we here, why do we do all of these things? At last we can offer a solution. We are on Earth to make Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg richer. There is an actual, measurable point to our striving. I guess what I’m saying, really, is that there’s always hope.” chapter four Having worked in the belly of the beast, Jeremy Winterbloss understood the comic industry’s traditions of racism and sexism. Any product not delivered by White men would receive less orders than products offered by White men.


pages: 574 words: 148,233

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Kara Swisher, “Zuckerberg: The Recode Interview,” Vox, October 8, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/7/18/17575156/mark-zuckerberg-interview-facebook-recode-kara-swisher. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 Monika Bickert, “Removing Holocaust Denial Content,” Meta-Facebook, October 12, 2020, https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/removing-holocaust-denial-content. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10 Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, “An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Our Child Died at Sandy Hook—Why Let Facebook Lies Hurt Us Even More?,” Guardian, July 25, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/25/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-sandy-hook-parents-open-letter.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Nicholas Confessore, “Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far,” New York Times, April 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 “Mark Zuckerberg Testimony: Senators Question Facebook’s Commitment to Privacy,” New York Times, April 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/us/politics/mark-zuckerberg-testimony.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 “Data Protection: Rules for the Protection of Personal Data Inside and Outside the EU,” European Commission, https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection_en.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11 Kurt Wagner and Rani Molla, “Facebook’s User Growth Has Hit a Wall,” Vox, July 25, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/7/25/17614426/facebook-fb-earnings-q2-2018-user-growth-troubles. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12 Janet Burns, “Sandy Hook Parents Decry Facebook’s Weak Moderation in Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg,” Forbes, July 27, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2018/07/27/sandy-hook-parents-decry-facebooks-weak-moderation-in-open-letter-to-mark-zuckerberg. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13 Casey Newton, “Facebook’s Forecast for the Future Looks Suddenly Bleak,” The Verge, July 26, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17615330/facebook-earnings-forecast-user-growth-revenue.


pages: 343 words: 102,846

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

(“He was definitely the youngest and most articulate entrepreneur in training that I know of at a Startup Weekend,” Marc Nager, the executive director of Startup Weekend, tells a tech commentator.)45 A promo e-mail I receive goes: “Want to be a marketing leader? Use the entrepreneurial techniques that made Mark Zuckerberg a success, says Ekaterina Walter, best-selling author of Think Like Zuck.” Even the unlovable likes of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is a hero. Here’s a glowing assessment of Zuckerberg in the New York Times on the eve of Facebook’s multibillion dollar IPO: “Mr. Zuckerberg’s success is an object lesson in what works in crowded, competitive Silicon Valley: Remain in charge, stave off potential predators and expand the company so quickly that no one can challenge the boss.”46 (Note: speedy constant expansion—keeping everyone in a constant state of change—that’s the way you stay on top.)

Oh and you can follow the little tike on Twitter @gaptoothkid. 46. Somini Sengupta, “Mark Zuckerberg Remains the Undisputed Boss at Facebook,” The New York Times, February 2, 2012, sec. Technology, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/technology/from-earliest-days-zuckerberg-focused-on-con-trolling-facebook.html. 47. Laura M. Holson, “Sean Parker Brings Facebook-Style Skills to New York Social Scene,” The New York Times, December 17, 2011, sec. Fashion & Style, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/fashion/sean-parker-brings-facebook-style-skills-to-new-york-social-scene.html. 48. Sengupta, “Mark Zuckerberg Remains the Undisputed Boss at Facebook.” 49.

They offer permanent connection to the ever-flowing tide of pop culture, to the possibilities of shape-shifting ourselves right into the future. In 2006, inspired by the empowering possibilities of connectivity, the Time magazine Person of the Year was “You.” The 2010 Time Person of the Year was Mark Zuckerberg.35 “You” aren’t good enough anymore. The rhetoric of special, of human hubris, continues to push into new terrain. Today it’s not just the present that we are repeatedly urged to shape and control; today, the future, too, is something that individuals are being told to contest, buy, sell and bring into being.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

And when it was revealed that Facebook’s algorithms inadvertently enabled advertisers to target consumers with cringe-worthy keywords like “Jew hater,” and a Russian troll farm secretly purchased $100 million of ads to spread “fake news” to further polarize Americans during the 2016 presidential contest, founder Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the limitations of his managers to control the algorithms. “I wish I could tell you we’re going to be able to catch all bad content in our system,” he announced in September 2017. “I wish I could tell you we’re going to be able to stop all interference, but that wouldn’t be realistic.” This prompted Kevin Roose of the New York Times to label this Facebook’s “Frankenstein moment,” likening this to Mary Shelley’s book, when the scientist—Dr. Frankenstein—realizes his robot creature “has gone rogue.” In October 2017, Mark Zuckerberg sheepishly admitted he should not have been so quick to defend the ability of Facebook’s machines to block “fake” news pushed by Russian hackers to subvert the Clinton presidential campaign.

Only four months later a headhunter called and asked if she would meet with Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook. At first she said no. “Carolyn was really torn,” Kassan recalls. “She’s a very ethical and loyal person. But this was an opportunity of a lifetime.” Eventually she weakened, and on the way to Australia for Microsoft she stopped in the Valley on a Sunday to meet with Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg. She spent a full day at Facebook. “I knew in my heart that’s where I wanted to be,” she says. “It was so much more entrepreneurial. Advertising was the entire business of Facebook, whereas at Microsoft it was a tiny piece.” Everson was the same age as Sheryl Sandberg, forty, and like her was a former Baker Scholar at the Harvard Business School and extremely well connected.

The other barrier impeding direct Facebook competion, Andrew Robertson cautions: “Why would they trade their forty percent profit margins for ours?” At their peril, agencies forget that Silicon Valley companies like Facebook take pride in being disrupters, in reducing costs and better serving customers by offering less “friction” and shoving aside what they see as superfluous middlemen. Mark Zuckerberg’s famous corporate mantra at Facebook used to be “Move fast and break things.” (In 2014, Facebook changed it to “Move fast with stable infra,” which doesn’t have quite the same edge to it, no doubt deliberately.) Unlike most agencies, Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of global communications, marketing, and public policy says, Facebook takes “the Wayne Gretzky approach to business.


pages: 468 words: 124,573

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator

mg= reno64-wsj. 17 ‘Small Retailers Reap the Benefits of Selling on Amazon, but Challenges Remain’, article on InternetRetailer.com, 14 February 2014, www.internetretailer.com/mobile500/. 18 Bill Siwicki, ‘It’s Official: Mobile Devices Surpass PCs in Online Retail’, article on InternetRetailer.com, 1 October 2013, www.internetretailer.com/2013/10/01/its-official-mobile-devices-surpass-pcs-online-retail. 19 ‘Mobile Commerce Comes of Age’, article on InternetRetailer.com, 24 September 2013, www.internetretailer.com/2013/09/24/mobile-commerce-comes-age. 20 ‘Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments Declined 6.9 Percent in Fourth Quarter of 2013’, article on Gartner.com, 9 January 2014, www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2647517. 21 Mary Meeker and Liang Wu, May 2013, slide 31, op. cit. 21 In-Soo Nam, ‘A Rising Addiction Among Youths: Smartphones’, article on WSJ.com, 23 July 2013, online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324263404578615162292157222.html. 23 ‘Americans Can’t Put Down Their SmartPhones, Even During Sex’, article on Jumio.com, 11 July 2013, www.jumio.com/2013/07/americans-cant-put-down-their-smartphones-even-during-sex/. 24 Drew Olanoff, ‘Mark Zuckerberg: Our Biggest Mistake was Betting Too Much on HTML5’, article on TechCrunch.com, 11 September 2012, TechCrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/. 25 Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Little, Brown: London, 2012, p. 501. 26 ‘Standish Newsroom – Open Source’, press release, Boston, April 2008, blog.standishgroup.com/pmresearch. 27 Richard Rothwell, ‘Creating Wealth with Free Software’, article on FreeSoftwareMagazine.com, 8 May 2012, www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/creating_wealth_free_software. 28 ‘Samsung Elec Says Gear Smartwatch Sales Hit 800,000 in 2 Months’, article on Reuters.com, 19 November 2013, www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/19/samsung-gear-idUSL4N0J41VR20131119. 29 Jay Yarow, ‘Meet the Team of Experts Apple Assembled To Create The iWatch, Its Next Industry-Defining Product’, article on BusinessInsider.com. 18 July 2013, www.BusinessInsider.com/iwatch-sensors-2013-7. 30 Macelo Ballve, ‘Wearable Gadgets Are Still Not Getting The Attention They Deserve – Here’s Why They Will Create A Massive New Market’, article on BusinessInsider.com, 29 August 2013, www.BusinessInsider.com/wearable-devices-create-a-new-market-2013-8.

The challenges with Web apps are numerous, from ensuring compatibility with mobile Web browsers and all their different versions – which involves a lot of testing – to complexities around mobile Web browsers being able to reliably access sensors (such as the microphone, compass or accelerometer) on your phone, and all the way through to how fast the Web app will run if it hasn’t been designed to run specifically on your phone. Facebook famously tried to pursue Web apps, only to have CEO Mark Zuckerberg do an about-turn in 2012, stating that it was his ‘single biggest mistake’,24 due to those same complexity and performance issues inherent in Web apps. If it hadn’t been for Apple Board member Art Levinson petitioning Jobs, the platform might never have been opened up. ‘I called him half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps’, but Jobs was against them, says Levinson, ‘partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.’25 It was definitely a valid point: Apple does check every single app submitted to the App Store before it’s released to the public, which has a certain cost and overheads associated with it.

I admire Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s CEO, for possessing such a clear vision and such an ability to build a singularly brilliant app on a single platform. The final twist to the story – doubling Instagram’s valuation in a mere four days – is the stuff of Silicon Valley legend. Instagram marked a turning point in Internet history: it was the first billion-dollar acquisition of an app. It led to speculation that Mark Zuckerberg had lost his mind and that Silicon Valley crazy-think was back in full force. Were people deluded into thinking it was 1999 all over again? On the surface, Instagram was just a group of 16 developers hacking some software in a poky office above a pizza shop in Palo Alto. They hadn’t made a cent in revenues.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

He made me feel like a slacker. At the rate he was going, Toby would be the world’s first online summer camp billionaire before I figured out where to catch the bus. At least the drones were humble. The most unbearable tech scenesters were those who seemed most certain that they were destined to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. These fell into the final category—the bullies. The bullies were binge-drinking gym rats who, regardless of age, seemed perpetually twenty-five years old. Most were white, but Raj, a Desi, was Hacker Condo’s resident bully. By emulating the performative, coked-up machismo of their overlords in the finance sector, the bullies were determined to avoid the old stigma of the computer nerd as a simpering eunuch.

There is, however, only one basketball court. An architect who designed custom luxury homes featured in magazines like Architectural Digest told me that nobody lived in those houses anyway. “The people who own them,” he said, “all have five others.” Some tech billionaires even owned five houses in the same place. Down in Palo Alto, Mark Zuckerberg purchased four properties adjacent to his $7 million five-bedroom home for a combined $39 million—more than ten times their assessed value. The purpose of the land grab was to maintain the seclusion of Zuckerberg’s backyard and master bedroom. At around that time, the city of Palo Alto passed an ordinance restricting public records access in order to protect the privacy of certain “very high-profile tech-related residents.”

Startups promised independence and financial freedom to people desperate for a taste of both. But most startup “chief executives” possessed little of either, for investors typically managed the process from founding to exit. I asked one cheerfully cynical VC over beers, “Are startup founders capital, or are they labor?” It depends, he replied. “Mark Zuckerberg is capital. But for every Zuckerberg there’s one hundred guys who basically got fired from their startups. They aren’t capital. They’re labor,” he said. They were ideal laborers, too, being allergic to the concept of solidarity. These founders worked like dogs, and until they struck it rich—which most never did—they often lived in barrackslike quarters not much more comfortable than my own.


Crushing It! EPB by Gary Vaynerchuk

augmented reality, driverless car, fear of failure, follow your passion, imposter syndrome, Mark Zuckerberg, passive income, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk

There are 1.15 billion daily active users: “The Top 20 Valuable Facebook Statistics—Updated November 2017,” Zephoria Digital Marketing, https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics. 3. Mark Zuckerberg called video: Michelle Castillo, “Mark Zuckerberg Sees Video as a ‘Mega Trend’ and Is Gunning for YouTube,” CNBC.com, Feb. 1, 2017, www.cnbc.com/2017/02/01/mark-zuckerberg-video-mega-trend-like-mobile.html. 4. In 2016, he told BuzzFeed: Mat Honan, “Why Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg Went All In on Live Video,” BuzzFeed News, Apr. 6, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/mathonan/why-facebook-and-mark-zuckerberg-went-all-in-on-live-video?utm_term=.fdwpA8ZBM#.tlGzWbZG7. 5. the platform is in the process: Jon Fingas, “Facebook Will Court ‘Millennials’ with Its Original Videos,” Engadget, May 24, 2017, https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/24/facebook-original-video-shows. 6.

As you’ll see, the strides Facebook is making in video make it likely that it’s about to become more appealing to those young viewers. You want to be waiting for them when they start opening Facebook accounts. Facebook will get to the young demo; you can count on it. Don’t ever underestimate Mark Zuckerberg, and don’t ever bet against Facebook. How I’m Crushing It Costa Kapothanasis, Costa Oil—10 Minute Oil Change IG: @costakapo Constantine “Costa” Kapothanasis sounds like a practical man. The first-generation Greek American from Portland, Maine, won a Division 1 baseball scholarship to a college in Maryland.

Eighteen months after this book is published, Facebook ad prices will have doubled or more. Take advantage of this wide-open runway while you still can and jump-start your brand awareness. Finally, as big as YouTube is, by the time this book is published, Facebook will be emerging as a fierce competitor in video. Mark Zuckerberg called video a “mega trend” of the same nature as mobile3 and has made it clear that video is Facebook’s future. In 2016, he told BuzzFeed, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.”4 When Facebook wants something to work, it puts all its support behind it.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Paul Lewis, “ ‘Utterly Horrifying’: Ex-Facebook Insider Says Covert Data Harvesting Was Routine,” Guardian, March 20, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/20/facebook-data-cambridge-analytica-sandy-parakilas; Nicol Perlroth and Sheera Frenkel, “The End for Facebook’s Security Evangelist,” New York Times, March 20, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/technology/alex-stamos-facebook-security.html. 25. Zeynep Tufekci, “Mark Zuckerberg Is in Denial,” New York Times, November 15, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/opinion/mark-zuckerberg-is-in-denial.html?_r=2. 26. Olivier Sylvain, “Intermediary Design Duties,” Connecticut Law Review 50, no. 1 (2018): 203; Danielle Keats Citron and Mary Anne Franks, “The Internet as a Speech Machine and Other Myths Confounding Section 230 Reform” (working paper, Public Law Research Paper No. 20-8, Boston University School of Law, Massachusetts, 2020); Carrie Goldberg, Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls (New York: Plume, 2019), 38. 27.

Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Raphael Ottoni, Robert West, Virgílio A. F. Almeida, and Wagner Meira Jr., “Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube,” arXiv:1908.08313 (2019), https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08313. 31. Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook before It Breaks Democracy?” New Yorker, September 10, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy. 32. James Bridle, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet,” Medium, https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2. 33. James Bridle, New Dark Age (New York: Verso, 2018), 230. 34.

Ryan Singel, “Feds Pop Google for $500M for Canadian Pill Ads,” Wired, August 24, 2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/08/google-drug-fine/. 53. Drew Harwell, “AI Will Solve Facebook’s Most Vexing Problems, Mark Zuckerberg Says. Just Don’t Ask When or How,” Washington Post, April 11, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/11/ai-will-solve-facebooks-most-vexing-problems-mark-zuckerberg-says-just-dont-ask-when-or-how/?utm_term=.a0a7c340ac66. 54. Instagram, “Community Guidelines,” https://help.instagram.com/477434105621119; also Sarah Jeong, “I Tried Leaving Facebook. I Couldn’t,” Verge, April 28, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/28/17293056/facebook-deletefacebook-social-network-monopoly. 55.


pages: 173 words: 53,564

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn by Chris Hughes

"World Economic Forum" Davos, basic income, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, end world poverty, full employment, future of journalism, gig economy, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, new economy, oil rush, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, Potemkin village, precariat, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Fast Company once put me on its cover with the headline “The Kid Who Made Obama President,” as if I were single-handedly responsible. As soon as the house of cards collapsed, people zeroed in on the power of chance in my story and discounted everything else. I went overnight from a wunderkind to the hapless, lucky roommate of Mark Zuckerberg. The truth is somewhere in between. For the early part of my life, my story played like a movie reel for the American Dream. I grew up in a middle-class family in a small town in North Carolina. I studied hard, got financial aid to go to a fancy prep school, and then went to Harvard. My roommates and I started Facebook our sophomore year, and my early success there and at the Obama campaign garnered me acclaim and notoriety.

My roommates and I started Facebook our sophomore year, and my early success there and at the Obama campaign garnered me acclaim and notoriety. Eventually, Facebook’s IPO made me a lot of money. I worked my way up, and I took every chance offered to me. I also got very lucky. That luck wasn’t just because I was Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate—much larger forces were at work. A collection of economic and political decisions over the past four decades has given rise to unprecedented wealth for a small number of fortunate people, collectively called the one percent. America has created and supported powerful economic forces—specifically globalization, rapid technological development, and the growth of finance—that have made the rise of Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, and other new billionaires possible.

I was only 18 years old that fall, but I knew that friends from Hickory and peers at Harvard saw in me the kind of “up by the bootstraps” success our country supposedly makes possible. Then, with the success of Facebook, that story was put on steroids. My sophomore year of college, I chose to room with an acquaintance I had met freshman year, Mark Zuckerberg, in order to be placed in the same dorm as many of my female friends. Dustin Moskovitz and Billy Olson were paired with Mark and me by chance, and the four of us lived in a single suite in Kirkland House. We got along well, but we weren’t a tight-knit group. Mark launched multiple projects that fall—a study guide for a class and a now infamous “hot or not” website that compared Harvard students’ faces to one another.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Rachelle Hampton, “The Black Feminists Who Saw the Alt-Right Threat Coming,” Slate (April 23, 2019), https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/black-feminists-alt-right-twitter-gamergate.html. 4. Diana ben-Aaron, “Interview: Weizenbaum Examines Computers and Society,” The Tech (April 9, 1985), 2. 5. Laura Raphael, “Mark Zuckerberg Called People Who Handed Over Their Data ‘Dumb F****,’” Esquire (March 20, 2018), https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zuckerberg-called-people-who-handed-over-their-data-dumb-f/. 6. In October 2019, Zuckerberg began to claim that he started Facebook as a way for people to share news and opinions about the US invasion of Iraq. For more on Facebook’s early days from one of its first employees, see Kate Losse, The Boy Kings (New York: Free Press, 2005). 7.

Migge and Léglise, “Language and Colonialism,” 6. 30. Crystal, English as a Global Language. 31. Randolph Quirk and Henry G. Widdowson, “English in the World,” Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures (1985): 1–34. 32. Maeve Shearlaw, “Mark Zuckerberg Says Connectivity Is a Basic Human Right—Do You Agree?,” Guardian (January 3, 2014), https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/jan/03/mark-zuckerberg-connectivity-basic-human-right. 33. Bill Wasik, “Welcome to the Age of Digital Imperialism,” New York Times (June 4, 2015), https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/welcome-to-the-age-of-digital-imperialism.html. 34.

Demetria Irwin, “Facebook, #Yeswecode Make a Splash at the Essence Music Festival,” Grio (July 6, 2014), https://thegrio.com/2014/07/06/facebook-yes-we-code-at-essence-music-festival/. 56. Irwin, “Facebook, #Yeswecode Make a Splash.” 57. Qeyno Labs, “A Black Mark Zuckerberg?,” press release (June 17, 2014), https://www.prlog.org/12337721-black-mark-zuckerberg-hackathon-empowers-youth-to-transform-nola-into-their-own-silicon-valley.html. 58. “Van Jones: Giving Black Geniuses Tools to Win with #Yeswecode,” Essence (May 2, 2014), https://www.essence.com/festival/2014-essence-festival/tk-van-jones/. 59.


pages: 299 words: 91,839

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Google’s founders and executives understand the change brought by the internet. That is why they are so successful and powerful, running what The Times of London dubbed “the fastest growing company in the history of the world.” The same is true of a few disruptive capitalists and quasi-capitalists such as Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; Craig Newmark, who calls himself founder and customer service representative—no joke—at craigslist; Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia; Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon; and Kevin Rose, creator of Digg. They see a different world than the rest of us and make different decisions as a result, decisions that make no sense under old rules of old industries that are now blown apart thanks to these new ways and new thinkers.

Only if you’re lucky. New Society Elegant organization Elegant organization I sat, dumbfounded, in an audience of executives at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum International Media Council in Davos, Switzerland, as the head of a powerful news organization begged young Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, for his secret. Please, the publisher beseeched him, how can my publication start a community like yours? We should own a community, shouldn’t we? Tell us how. Zuckerberg, 22 at the time, is a geek of few words. Some assume his laconicism is a sign of arrogance—that and his habit of wearing sandals at big business conferences.

When Facebook introduced the news feed that compiles tidbits from friends’ pages and activities, some users were freaked by what they perceived as a loss of privacy (even though anything going into news feeds was already public). Protest groups were formed inside the service, using Facebook to organize a fight against Facebook. Founder Mark Zuckerberg apologized for not warning users and explaining the feature well enough—communication was his real problem—and Facebook added new privacy controls. There was no exodus. Today, I don’t think any user would disagree that the news feed is a brilliant insight; it is the heart of the service. Though he makes mistakes, Zuckerberg makes them well by listening to customers and responding quickly.


pages: 284 words: 92,688

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

In May 2011, LinkedIn, a social network, went public and saw its shares more than double in their first day of trading. Later in 2011 Groupon and Zynga floated the biggest IPOs since Google in 2004. In May 2012 Facebook went public, in the biggest IPO in the history of the tech industry, one that placed a value of more than $100 billion on the social network that Mark Zuckerberg had started on a lark in his Harvard dorm room eight years before. Now everyone is trying to spot the next Facebook, and a new tech frenzy is taking shape. Back on the East Coast, where I spend my weekends, there is a vague sense that maybe things are getting a little bit frothy out in the Bay Area.

On top of that, a lot of these new start-up founders are somewhat unsavory people. The old tech industry was run by engineers and MBAs; the new tech industry is populated by young, amoral hustlers, the kind of young guys (and they are almost all guys) who watched The Social Network and its depiction of Mark Zuckerberg as a lying, thieving, backstabbing prick—and left the theater wanting to be just like that guy. Many are fresh out of college, or haven’t even bothered to graduate. Their companies look and feel a lot like frat houses. Twitter, at one point, will literally hold a frat-themed party. In 2012 a new word has entered the Silicon Valley lexicon: brogrammer, which refers to a kind of macho dickhead who chugs from a beer bong and harasses women.

Maybe the people at HubSpot have figured something out. Maybe the best way to do something really innovative is to hire a bunch of young people who have no experience and therefore no preconceived notions about how to run a company. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were twenty-five years old when they founded Google. Mark Zuckerberg was twenty when he founded Facebook, and once famously said, “Young people are just smarter.” Maybe Zuckerberg was right. Sure, experience is valuable, but I’m willing to accept the idea that experience can also be an impediment. Forbes and Newsweek were filled with old-timers who scoffed at the Internet, didn’t understand it, and didn’t want to understand it.


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked (New York: Penguin, 2017), 8.   1.  “Real Time Billionaires,” Forbes, www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires. These are updated every five minutes daily when the stock markets are open. When I first checked in November 2020, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates ranked number 1 and 2 respectively and Mark Zuckerberg ranked number 4. By March 2022, Mark Zuckerberg dropped down to the teens and Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates were 1, 2, and 4 respectively.   2.  See for instance, American Heritage Medical Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/technophobe; Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge University Press, dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/nstagr/technophobe; Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/technophobia.   3.  

Williams, McIntosh, and Farthing, “Profiling Children for Advertising.” 76.  Natasha Singer, “Mark Zuckerberg Is Urged to Scrap Plans for an Instagram for Children,” New York Times, April 15, 2021. 77.  Adam Barnes, “44 US Attorneys General Urge Facebook to Cancel ‘Instagram for Kids,’” The Hill, May 11, 2021, thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/552797-44-us-attorneys-general-urge-facebook-to-cancel-instagram-for. 78.  Senator Ed Markey and Representatives Kathy Castor and Lori Trahan wrote a public letter to Mark Zuckerberg urging him not to go forward with Instagram for Kids. www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fb_wsj_report.pdf, September 15, 2021. 79.  

Interestingly, while eighth and tenth graders who use social media two hours a week are happier than kids who don’t use it at all, the survey also found that those kids who are extremely light social media users are happier than kids who use social media two hours a day, which is not even considered heavy use.62 While social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube claim that they don’t allow users under thirteen years of age, millions of younger children lie about their ages to create accounts.63 The time preteen girls who pretend to be teenagers spend with social media is linked to increased dissatisfaction with their appearance.64 Yet, in March 2021, an internal memo leaked to BuzzFeed revealed that Instagram, which is owned by Meta, was creating a children’s version of its platform.65 Facebook was already directly targeting young children through Messenger Kids, an iteration of Facebook’s instant messaging service, which launched in 2017.66 Two years later, it was discovered that despite the company’s claim that children using Messenger Kids could talk only to users approved by their parents, children in group chats were in unsupervised contact with strangers.67 Facebook fixed what it called a “design flaw,” but critics saw it as emblematic of the company’s inability, or unwillingness, to truly protect children.68 At a congressional hearing just three days after news of Meta’s plan for a kids Instagram surfaced, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder, CEO, and principal shareholder, tried to allay concerns about children using social media by saying that “the research that we’ve seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits.”69 What’s especially egregious about Zuckerberg’s testimony and Meta’s determination to foist Instagram on preteens and younger kids is that the company’s executives have known for years that the popular social media site is toxic for a significant percentage of teenage girls.


pages: 223 words: 60,909

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Victor Luckerson, “Here’s Why Facebook Won’t Put Your News Feed in Chronological Order,” Time, July 9, 2015, http://time.com/3951337/facebook-chronological-order. 50. Josh Constine, “Facebook’s S-1 Letter from Zuckerberg Urges Understanding before Investment,” TechCrunch, February 1, 2012, https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/facebook-ipo-letter. 51. Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook post, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634. 52. “When FOMO Meets JOMO,” Note to Self, WNYC, January 20, 2016, http://www.wnyc.org/story/fomo-jomo. Chapter 9: Meritocracy Now, Meritocracy Forever 1. From Brian S. Hall’s now-deleted article in Forbes, “There Is No Diversity Crisis in Tech,” which he reposted at Medium.com on October 7, 2015: https://medium.com/@brianshall/the-article-on-diversity-in-tech-that-forbes-took-down-15cfd28d5639#.sp3ogqmuw. 2.

Back in 2010, technologist Tim Jones, then of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote that he had asked his Twitter followers to help him come up with a name for this method of using “deliberately confusing jargon and user-interfaces” to “trick your users into sharing more info about themselves than they really want to.” 8 One of the most popular suggestions was Zuckering. The term, of course, refers to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder—who, a few months before, had dramatically altered Facebook’s default privacy settings. Facebook insisted that the changes were empowering—that its new features would give the 350 million users it had at the time the tools to “personalize their privacy,” 9 by offering more granular controls over who can see what.

But instead, Facebook once again decided to just let the machines sort it out, and pick up the pieces later. Only this time, there was a lot more at stake than users missing a few photos from their favorite friends, or seeing too many updates from a friend’s cousin who they hung out with once at a wedding. These core values aren’t new. In fact, if you ask Mark Zuckerberg, they’re the core of the company, and always have been. Back when Facebook filed for IPO, in 2012, he lauded those values in a letter to investors: “As most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly,” he wrote.


pages: 276 words: 59,165

Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change by Ronald Cohen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, benefit corporation, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, diversification, driverless car, Elon Musk, family office, financial independence, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, minimum viable product, moral hazard, performance metric, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, zero-sum game

Non-profit grants since inception: $822 million. 73 https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/blog/give-smart/impact-investing-ebay-founder-pierre-omidyar 74 http://skoll.org/about/about-skoll/ 75 Ibid. 76 https://thegiin.org/research/spotlight/investor-spotlight-capricorn-investment-group 77 https://www.saildrone.com/ 78 https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work 79 https://sif.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/ Note that investments from the fund are structured as ‘program-related investments’, which is a defined term in the US Internal Revenue Code that governs charitable investments made by a private foundation. 80 http://www.investwithimpact.co/principal-venture-capital-bill-melinda-gates-foundation/ 81 https://sif.gatesfoundation.org/impact-stories/empowering-women-strengthening-families/ 82 https://beyondtradeoffs.economist.com/improving-lives-innovative-investments 83 http://www.investwithimpact.co/principal-venture-capital-bill-melinda-gates-foundation/ 84 Note: Wealth valued at $45 billion at time of founding https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-giving-away-99-of-his-facebook-shares-2015-12 85 https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-letter-to-our-daughter/10153375081581634/ 86 https://www.macfound.org/press/press-releases/150-million-catalytic-capital-help-address-critical-social-challenges/ 87 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2019/04/16/questioning-big-philanthropy-at-the-skoll-world-forum-is-it-too-powerful-and-out-of-touch/#375764b76253 88 https://www.bertelsmannstiftung.de/fileadmin/files/user_upload/Market_Report_SII_in_Germany_2016.pdf 89 https://www.socialfinance-org-uk/resources/publications/portuguese-social-investment-taskforce-blueprint-portugal%22%80%99s-emerging-social Chapter 6: Government: Solving Bigger Problems, Faster 1 https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?

Most of the Andela developers lived ‘on campus’ in subsidized housing during their fellowship immersion program.61 ‘The long-term goal is for them to be unleashed, to really spread and lead the spread of technology across the continent,’ said Sass.62 According to Sass, a quarter of them wanted to start their own companies,63 while others might become tech leaders at existing companies, advisors to organizations or help Andela scale its model.64 Andela’s business model – with a focus on workforce development, education and tech – and its longer-term goals of helping grow the African tech sector, had attracted the attention of highly sought-after investors. In 2015, AOL co-founder Steve Case and Omidyar were among those who participated in a funding round totaling $10 million to help Andela expand across the continent.65 A year later, Andela captured the eye of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, who led a $24-million second round of funding through their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. In fact, Andela was CZI’s first lead investment and they were accompanied by GV (formerly Google Ventures), Spark Capital, Omidyar Network, Learn Capital and CRE Venture Capital.

Shortly after investing, Zuckerberg traveled to Lagos to visit the Andela office and meet the company’s staff. Sass said in an interview, ‘We said to all of our applicants, especially in the early days … we are going to tell the entire world about the caliber of your talent. And in an instant, that just became incredibly real to them the second that [Mark Zuckerberg] walked in.’66 In 2017, the company raised $40 million in a third funding round led by CRE Venture Capital, one of the largest ever rounds in an Africa-based company to be led by an African venture firm. The new money would fund Andela’s expansion into two more African countries and double its base of developers.67 By 2019, Andela had served more than 200 clients, attracted over 130,000 applications and selected 1,500 developers.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

London: Sage, 2014. Kitchin, Rob, and Martin Dodge. Code/Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Kitchin, Rob, and Gavin McArdle. “Urban Data and City Dashboards: Six Key Issues.” SocArXiv (2016). https://osf.io/k2epn/. Klein, Ezra. “Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s Hardest Year, and What Comes Next.” Vox, April 2, 2018. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge. Klein, Naomi. “Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson.” YES! Magazine, March 5, 2013. http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-no-more-leanne-simpson. .

They are often combined with an overarching imaginative claim that we might call myth: the myth that all this is inevitable and that today’s infrastructures of connection and data extraction fulfill human beings’ collective potential in some transcendent way.59 The term community, as something seemingly inherent to human life, can easily fuel this myth. Think not just of Mark Zuckerberg’s frequent appeals to Facebook’s “global community” but also of the Tencent CEO’s invocation of a “digital ecological community.”60 This ideology of inevitability also has its counterpart in ideas on the anticapitalist left that treat networks as the basis for a leap toward overthrowing capitalism.61 Colonialism’s and Capitalism’s New Embrace Data colonialism has a distinctive geography.

The result, in Rieder’s view, is “a largely conservative vision of society” that interprets content based on accumulated total linkages, downplaying intense new patterns of linkage.127 The important point is not the details of Google’s constantly changing algorithm but that each software system—and every interface built on that software—embeds decisions that encapsulate a particular “theory of the social” on which that software’s functioning relies.128 The wider consequences of this new social theory need to be understood. Executives in the social quantification sector, whether or not they planned to, are becoming social theorists, or at least trying to sound like them. “Thank you for believing in this community,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg in his full-page apology in British Sunday newspapers on March 25, 2018, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But behind the bland term community lay a lot of background theorizing. Certainly executives’ habit of speaking like social theorists did not start in the past decade.129 Just before the 2012 Facebook international public-share offering, Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook is “a fabric that can make any experience online social.”130 In 2010, he had already dubbed the 2007 invention of the social graph (Facebook’s way of mapping the network connections between users) “our way of explaining the phenomenon we thought was happening in the world.”131 When Facebook’s open graph (which aggregates people’s Facebook networks with the wider data Facebook gets from “likes” and via its plug-ins) was launched later in 2010, Zuckerberg speculated more broadly: We believe that eventually almost all apps are going to be social but in the world there’s a natural spectrum from behaviors that are really naturally social to ones that aren’t and the ones that are naturally social are going to be the ones that turn into social apps. . . .


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

, India Today, 2 July 2018 <https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/16-lynchings-in-2-months-is-social-media-the-new-serial-killer-1275182-2018-07-02> [accessed 4 October 2020]. 10 ‘India Lynchings: WhatsApp Sets New Rules after Mob Killings’, BBC News, 20 July 2018 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-44897714> [accessed 4 October 2020]. 11 Reuters Staff, ‘Facebook’s WhatsApp Limits Users to Five Text Forwards to Curb Rumors’, Reuters, 21 January 2019 <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-whatsapp-idUSKCN1PF0TP> [accessed 4 October 2020]. 12 Paul Mozur, ‘A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military (Published 2018)’, New York Times, 15 October 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html> [accessed 8 January 2021]. 13 Matthew Smith, ‘Facebook Wanted to Be a Force for Good in Myanmar. Now It Is Rejecting a Request to Help With a Genocide Investigation’, Time, 18 August 2020 <https://time.com/5880118/myanmar-rohingya-genocide-facebook-gambia/> [accessed 8 January 2021]. 14 Madeleine Carlisle, ‘Mark Zuckerberg Says Facebook’s Decision to Not Take Down Kenosha Militia Page Was a Mistake’, Time, 29 August 2020 <https://time.com/5884804/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-kenosha-shooting-jacob-blake/> [accessed 13 January 2021]. 15 Nick Clegg, ‘You and the Algorithm: It Takes Two to Tango’, Medium, 31 March 2021 <https://nickclegg.medium.com/you-and-the-algorithm-it-takes-two-to-tango-7722b19aa1c2> [accessed 31 March 2021]. 16 Carissa Véliz, ‘Privacy Matters Because It Empowers Us All’, Aeon, 2019 <https://aeon.co/essays/privacy-matters-because-it-empowers-us-all> [accessed 5 April 2021]. 17 ‘Google Form S-1’, 2004 <https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504073639/ds1.htm> [accessed 5 April 2021]. 18 Farhad Manjoo and Nadieh Bremer, ‘I Visited 47 Sites.

MySpace grew quickly and became the titan of this emerging industry, having, at its peak, 115 million users. But it was Facebook that demonstrated the sheer speed with which digital technologies can grow. After Facebook launched in February 2004, it became one of the fastest-growing products in world history, amassing its first million users in just 15 months. Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, today has the most popular product on the planet. Facebook had 2.5 billion users at the end of 2019. Today, however, the speed of Facebook’s growth looks positively quaint. Witness Lime. Founded in San Francisco in January 2017, the company places distinctive green electric scooters and bikes around cities.

Bundy’s invention represented an early move towards a more scientific, regulated, empirical system of people management. Since Bundy’s time – he died in 1907 – methods of managing employees became progressively more sophisticated. Methods like Bundy’s would be applied systematically across industries. The tipping point was the rise of scientific management, pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Like Mark Zuckerberg more than a century later, Taylor attended the prestigious boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy before attending – and dropping out of – Harvard. He went on to work in a machine shop in the steel industry at the age of 19. During his experiences on the shop floor, he noted that workers soldiered at a ‘slow easy gait’ because of a ‘natural laziness’.


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For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Facebook’s headquarters are a visceral reminder of the enormous societal transformation that the technology industry in general and Silicon Valley in particular have wrought over the last two decades. A website started by a computer whiz operating out of a Harvard College dorm room turned, almost overnight, into an $800 billion company, creating instant millionaires out of its early contributors. Mark Zuckerberg himself is worth an estimated $76 billion. The golden age of start-up culture dawned with Facebook. And somehow, the most dominant corporation of the millennium gives away its most valuable product for free. It’s an unlikely story, but it’s also an emblematic one. Facebook is no longer unique in the universe of corporations.

Henry Ford was forty when he founded his Ford Motor Company. Jerome Kohlberg was fifty when he started KKR, and his comparatively baby-faced partners, Henry Kravis and George Roberts, were both a fully grown thirty-two. All of them had extensive experience in their industries before deciding to launch their ventures. Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, was a college sophomore at Harvard, taking classes in psychology and Roman art, shuffling around campus in his Adidas slides, and attending fraternity parties on the weekends. But by the time Zuckerberg turned twenty, his company, Facebook, had a million users. Depending on your perspective about the merits of youth, this may sound either refreshing or terrifying.

Was it just a way to pirate free music? At the end of the 1990s, a slew of companies had soared to great heights on bets about what the future of the internet would look like, but most of them came crashing down when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. So the internet question was still very much up in the air. For Mark Zuckerberg, a sophomore living in Kirkland House at Harvard College, it was clear what the internet’s killer application was: fun. Zuckerberg had grown up loving computers. He received his first one in sixth grade, and he quickly became obsessed with video games, particularly the world-domination game Civilization, which he played well into adulthood.


pages: 482 words: 121,173

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Deepa Seetharaman, “Zuckerberg Defends Facebook Against Charges It Harmed Political Discourse,” Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/zuckerberg-defends-facebook-against-charges-it-harmed-political-discourse-1478833876. Back to note reference 12. Chloe Watson, “The Key Moments from Mark Zuckerberg’s Testimony to Congress,” Guardian, April 11, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/11/mark-zuckerbergs-testimony-to-congress-the-key-moments. Back to note reference 13. Mark R. Warner, “Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms” (draft white paper, Senate Intelligence Committee, 2018), https://www.scribd.com/document/385137394/MRW-Social-Media-Regulation-Proposals-Developed.

Back to note reference 12. Grace Halden, Three Mile Island: The Meltdown Crisis and Nuclear Power in American Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2017), 65. Back to note reference 13. Julia Carrie Wong, “Mark Zuckerberg Apologises for Facebook’s ‘Mistakes’ over Cambridge Analytica,” Guardian, March 22, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/21/mark-zuckerberg-response-facebook-cambridge-analytica. Back to note reference 14. See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).

The people of Estonia learned firsthand after the Iron Curtain came crashing down that freedom brings its own challenges, and they can be dizzying. “In some sense that’s actually a very frightening situation because everybody has trouble figuring out what they really want,” the exhibit states. “So what should you want if everything’s allowed? And then people run themselves ragged in all directions.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created his online platform to make the world more “open and connected.” At one level, it’s the ultimate endorsement of freedom. But in a country where KGB intelligence agents had registered, tracked, and pulled printed samples from every typewriter in the country to discourage unsanctioned communications, Estonians know all too well how overwhelming it can be when the tap of information and ideas suddenly flows freely.


pages: 391 words: 123,597

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

The SCL and Cambridge Analytica staff were energized by Alexander’s vision. The opportunity open to them was the equivalent of that at Facebook in the early days, and it hadn’t taken Facebook too many years to go public to the tune of an $18 billion valuation. Alexander wanted a similar outcome, and as Millennials, the staff looked to Mark Zuckerberg’s baby as a model of remarkable innovation in spaces no one had even thought to occupy until the company came along. Cambridge Analytica was based on the same idealistic notion of “connectivity” and “engagement” that had fueled Facebook. The company’s raison d’être was to boost engagement in uncharted territory, and those who worked there clearly believed, as those at Facebook had, that they were building something real that the world simply didn’t yet know it couldn’t do without.

The young Cambridge Analytica staff were energized by Alexander’s vision; I was, too. We worked for a company that was building something important, something real that could boost engagement across the connected world. My own experience with Facebook was not dissimilar to that of every other Millennial. It seemed always to have been there as part of my life. I didn’t know Mark Zuckerberg directly, but when he started the company in 2004, he did so with a high school colleague of mine named Chris Hughes. Chris and I had worked together on Andover’s school newspaper, the Phillipian, and later I found it exciting to see one of our own involved in such an innovative project as “The Facebook” while still in college.

With some forty thousand third-party developers, and more and more users from those third parties spending exponentially more time on Facebook, the social media company now had the ability to provide anyone with hundreds of data points on its users. With the Federal Trade Commission admonishment of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in 2010 regarding use of the Friends API and “deceptive practices,” the company was “now expected to plug the gaps,” but it struggled to find a way to make that work in tandem with its growth strategy.5 Would it be possible to care about both data protection and exponential profits?


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

SCREAMING FOR QUIET THE DREAMS OF READERS LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF PRIVACY HOOKED MOTHER GOOGLE THE LIBRARY OF UTOPIA THE BOYS OF MOUNTAIN VIEW THE EUNUCH’S CHILDREN PAST-TENSE POP THE LOVE THAT LAYS THE SWALE IN ROWS THE SNAPCHAT CANDIDATE WHY ROBOTS WILL ALWAYS NEED US LOST IN THE CLOUD THE DAEDALUS MISSION Acknowledgments Index UTOPIA IS CREEPY Introduction SILICON VALLEY DAYS IT WAS A SCENE out of an Ambien nightmare: A jackal with the face of Mark Zuckerberg stood over a freshly killed zebra, gnawing at the animal’s innards. But I was not asleep. The vision arrived midday, triggered by the Facebook founder’s announcement—this was in the spring of 2011—that “the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.” Zuckerberg had begun his new “personal challenge,” he told Fortune magazine, by boiling a lobster alive.

To go “off grid” now, you pretty much have to turn yourself into a counterespionage operative, a secret agent living in a yurt and nibbling the bruised leaves of a discarded cabbage. THE SOCIAL GRAFT November 6, 2007 “ONCE EVERY HUNDRED YEARS media changes,” boy-coder turned big-thinker Mark Zuckerberg declared today at the Facebook Social Advertising Event in New York City. It’s true. Look back over the last millennium or two, and you’ll see that every century, like clockwork, there’s been a big change in media. Cave painting lasted a hundred years, and then there was smoke signaling, which also lasted a hundred years, and of course there was the hundred years of yodeling, and then there was the printing press, which was invented almost precisely a hundred years ago, and so forth up to the present day—the day that Facebook picked up the hundred-year torch and ran with it.

The Gothic High-Tech, who cannot abide death, face a problem here: The organ donation system is largely democratic; it can’t be gamed easily by wealth. A rich person may be able to travel somewhere that has shorter lines—Tennessee, say—but he can’t jump to the head of the line. So the challenge becomes one of increasing the supply, of making rare components plentiful. 7. A week ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a move that he said was inspired by the experience of his friend Steve Jobs, announced that Facebook was introducing a new feature that would make it easy for members to identify themselves as organ donors. Should Zuckerberg’s move increase the supply of organs, it will save many lives and alleviate much suffering.


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To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

v=kUHF43xjMJM. 1 “‘Solutionism’ . . . is indeed the name of the game”: quoted in Gilles Paquet, The New Geo-Governance: A Baroque Approach (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2005), 315. 1 “The overriding question”: Paul Dourish and Scott D. Mainwaring, “UbiComp’s Colonial Impulse,” in Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp ‘12 (New York: ACM, 2012), 133–142. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2370216.2370238, 6. 1 While Mark Zuckerberg insists: see, e.g., Zuckerberg’s interview with Charlie Rose: “Exclusive Interview with Facebook Leadership: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO/Co-Founder and Sheryl Sandberg, COO,” Charlie Rose, November 7, 2011, http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11981. 2 BinCam, a new project from researchers in Britain and Germany: my account of BinCam is based on a paper written by its designers.

Friedman, “Make Way for the Radical Center,” New York Times, July 23, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24friedman.html. 111 “10,000 clicks from 10 states”: Lawrence Lessig, “The Last Best Chance for Campaign Finance Reform: Americans Elect,” The Atlantic, April 25, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/the-last-best-chance-for-campaign-finance-reform-americans-elect/256361 . 111 Cue the Shirky-esque tone of Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks in 2008: see his interview with Sarah Lacy at SXSW 2008. Video is available at http://allfacebook.com/mark-zuckerberg-sarah-lacy-interview-video_b1063. 111 “outdated and antiquated”: Steven Overly, “Web Start-Up Ruck.us Aims to Engage the Politically Independent,” Washington Post, March 12, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/web-start-up-ruckus-aims-to-engage-the-politically-independent/2012/03/09/gIQAKvU55R_story.html . 112 “the word comes from rugby”: Ruck.us, “FAQs,” http://blog.ruck.us/faqs. 112 “Whereas 30 years ago we were blissfully ignorant”: Nathan Daschle, “How to Pick Your Presidential Candidate Online,” CNN.com, April 19, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/19/opinion/daschle-elect/index.html. 113 “the Americans Elect innovation is so exciting”: ibid. 113 “The trends are undeniable”: ibid. 113 “Politics is the last sector”: Alex Fitzpatrick, “Ruck.Us Breaks Up Party Politics on the Social Web,” Mashable, May 11, 2012, http://mashable.com/2012/05/11/ruckus. 114 “Plots to disrupt the two-party system”: Steve Freiss, “Son of Democratic Party Royalty Creates a Ruck.us,” Politico, June 26, 2012, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77847.html. 114 “our two-party system doesn’t form”: ibid. 114 “the creativity of party politics”: Nancy L.

If you listen to its loudest apostles, Silicon Valley is all about solving problems that someone else—perhaps the greedy bankers on Wall Street or the lazy know-nothings in Washington—have created. “Technology is not really about hardware and software any more. It’s really about the mining and use of this enormous data to make the world a better place,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, told an audience of MIT students in 2011. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who argues that his company’s mission is to “make the world more open and connected,” concurs. “We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money,” he proclaimed just a few months before his company’s rapidly plummeting stock convinced all but its most die-hard fans that Facebook and making money had parted ways long ago.


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The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

For his part, Le recalls Chesky spending a lot of time out on the balcony, either on the phone or “deep in thought.” Le made him an espresso every morning (which he says Chesky drank “in two seconds”) and drove him to the festival, during which time Chesky described his vision for the company and his fervent hope to meet Mark Zuckerberg, who was speaking at the conference. Despite pulling in zero outside business, the South by Southwest launch actually served a few purposes. By using the website himself, Chesky identified some kinks in the payment process. He’d forgotten to go to the ATM not once but twice, so for two nights he was in the awkward position of staying in the home of a stranger who had no reason to believe he’d actually pay.

Despite the bookings and the media coverage, as soon as the convention was over, traffic crashed. “We realized if only there were political conventions every week, we’d be huge,” Chesky said. Instead, they were back at square one. Chesky would later put it in medical terms: they were losing their patient. “I Don’t Remember Mark Zuckerberg Assembling Cereal Boxes” Back at home in San Francisco, with Blecharczyk back in Boston, Chesky and Gebbia were launched, out of money, in debt, and without traffic. Desperate and nearly out of options, they resuscitated an idea they’d had before the DNC, which was to ship their “hosts” free breakfast that they could then in turn give to their paying guests.

Back in the kitchen, with a thousand flat boxes and a hot-glue gun, they got to work, hand-folding the boxes and sealing them shut with the glue. “It was like doing giant origami on my kitchen table,” Chesky recalled during the Lacy interview. He burned his hands. He thought to himself that he couldn’t remember Mark Zuckerberg hot-gluing anything or burning his hands assembling cereal boxes to launch Facebook. Maybe, he thought, this wasn’t a good sign. But they finished the boxes, and, in their last-ditch attempt at stirring up attention for their failing company, alerted the press. Tech reporters got bombarded with pitches, they reasoned, but they probably didn’t get cereal shipped to their desks all that often.


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AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

Two years later, Facebook was storming college campuses with its clean design and niche targeting of students. Wang adopted both when he created Xiaonei (“On Campus”). The network was exclusive to Chinese college students, and the user interface was an exact copy of Mark Zuckerberg’s site. Wang meticulously recreated the home page, profiles, tool bars, and color schemes of the Palo Alto startup. Chinese media reported that the earliest version of Xiaonei even went so far as to put Facebook’s own tagline, “A Mark Zuckerberg Production,” at the bottom of each page. Xiaonei was a hit, but one that Wang sold off too early. As the site grew rapidly, he couldn’t raise enough money to pay for server costs and was forced to accept a buyout.

gives a thousand families a stipend: Pender, “Oakland Group.” “VC for the People”: Steve Randy Waldman, “VC for the People,” Interfluidity (blog), April 16, 2014, http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5066.html. “everyone has a cushion”: Chris Weller, “Mark Zuckerberg Calls for Exploring Basic Income in Harvard Commencement Speech,” Business Insider, May 25, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-basic-income-harvard-speech-2017-5. two fastest growing professions: Ben Casselman, “A Peek at Future Jobs Reveals Growing Economic Divides,” New York Times, October 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/business/economy/future-jobs.html.

BUILDING BLOCKS AND STUMBLING BLOCKS Silicon Valley investors take as an article of faith that a pure innovation mentality is the foundation on which companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple are built. It was an irrepressible impulse to “think different” that drove people like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos to create these companies that would change the world. In that school of thought, China’s knockoff clockmakers were headed down a dead-end road. A copycat mentality is a core stumbling block on the path to true innovation. By blindly imitating others—or so the theory goes—you stunt your own imagination and kill the chances of creating an original and innovative product.


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Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Randall Stross (28 Aug 2005), “Google anything, so long as it’s not Google,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/technology/28digi.html. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Bobbie Johnson (10 Jan 2010), “Privacy no longer a social norm, says Facebook founder,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy. bought the four houses: Brian Bailey (11 Oct 2013), “Mark Zuckerberg buys four houses near his Palo Alto home,” San Jose Mercury News, http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24285169/mark-zuckerberg-buys-four-houses-near-his-palo-alto-home. few secrets we don’t tell someone: Peter E. Sand (Spring/Summer 2006), “The privacy value,” I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy 2, http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/is/files/2012/02/5-Sand.pdf.

Both China and Russia: Shannon Tiezzi (28 Mar 2014), “China decries US ‘hypocrisy’ on cyber-espionage,” Diplomat, http://thediplomat.com/2014/03/china-decries-us-hypocrisy-on-cyber-espionage. Xinhua News Agency (11 Jul 2014), “Putin calls US surveillance practice ‘utter hypocrisy,’” China Daily, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2014-07/11/content_17735783.htm. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Mark Zuckerberg (13 Mar 2014), “As the world becomes more complex … ,” Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101301165605491. 8: Commercial Fairness and Equality Accretive Health is: Office of the Minnesota Attorney General (19 Jan 2012), “Attorney General Swanson sues Accretive Health for patient privacy violations,” Office of the Minnesota Attorney General, http://www.ag.state.mn.us/Consumer/PressRelease/120119AccretiveHealth.asp.

The Internet is fundamentally a global platform. While countries continue to censor and control, today people in repressive regimes can still read information from and exchange ideas with the rest of the world. Internet freedom is a human rights issue, and one that the US should support. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly took the Obama administration to task on this, writing, “The US government should be the champion for the Internet, not a threat.” He’s right. 8 Commercial Fairness and Equality Accretive Health is a debt collection agency that worked for a number of hospitals in Minnesota. It was in charge of billing and collection for those hospitals, but it also coordinated scheduling, admissions, care plans, and duration of hospital stays.


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Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

North Koreans are now measurably shorter: Richard Knight, “Are North Koreans Really Three Inches Shorter Than South Koreans?,” BBC News, Apr. 23, 2012. intellectual flotsam: Annie Lowrey, “Switzerland’s Proposal to Pay People for Being Alive,” New York Times Magazine, Nov. 12, 2013. Mark Zuckerberg: Mark Zuckerberg, Commencement Address, Cambridge, MA, May 25, 2017, Harvard Gazette. Hillary Clinton: Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 239. the Black Lives Matter movement: “Reparations,” The Movement for Black Lives, July 26, 2016, https://policy.m4bl.org/​reparations/.

In the past few years—with the middle class being squeezed, trust in government eroding, technological change hastening, the economy getting Uberized, and a growing body of research on the power of cash as an antipoverty measure being produced—it has vaulted to a surprising prominence, even pitching from airy hypothetical to near-reality in some places. Mark Zuckerberg, Hillary Clinton, the Black Lives Matter movement, Bill Gates, Elon Musk—these are just a few of the policy proposal’s flirts, converts, and supporters. UBI pilots are starting or ongoing in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Canada, and Kenya, with India contemplating one as well. Some politicians are trying to get it adopted in California, and it has already been the subject of a Swiss referendum, where its reception exceeded activists’ expectations despite its defeat.

Even if the government replaced Social Security and many of its other antipoverty programs with a UBI, its spending would still have to increase by a number in the hundreds of billions, each and every year. Stepping back even further: Is a UBI really the best use of scarce resources? Does it make any sense to bump up taxes in order to give people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates $1,000 a month, along with all those working-class families, retirees, children, unemployed individuals, and so on? Would it not be more efficient to tax rich people and direct money to poor people through means-testing, as programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP or food stamps, already do?


pages: 270 words: 79,068

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, business intelligence, cloud computing, financial independence, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, new economy, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative

The Struggle is a cold sweat. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you are going to spit blood. The Struggle is not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if you are weak. Always if you are weak. Most people are not strong enough. Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through the Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is the Struggle. The Struggle is where greatness comes from. SOME STUFF THAT MAY OR MAY NOT HELP There is no answer to the Struggle, but here are some things that helped me: Don’t put it all on your shoulders.

Roles needn’t be clearly defined and, in fact, can’t be, because everyone does a little bit of everything. In an environment like this there are no politics and nobody is jockeying for position or authority. It’s rather nice. So why do all organizations eventually create job titles and what is the proper way to manage them? (Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg for contributing to my thinking on this subject.) WHY DO TITLES MATTER? Two important factors drive all companies to eventually create job titles: 1. Employees want them. While you may plan to work at your company forever, at least some of your employees need to plan for life after your company.

ZUCKERBERG: HOW BIG SHOULD THE TITLES BE? Should your company make Vice President the top title or should you have Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Revenue Officers, Chief People Officers, and Chief Snack Officers? There are two schools of thought regarding this, one represented by Marc Andreessen and the other by Mark Zuckerberg. Andreessen argues that people ask for many things from a company: salary, bonus, stock options, span of control, and titles. Of those, title is by far the cheapest, so it makes sense to give the highest titles possible. The hierarchy should have Presidents, Chiefs, and Senior Executive Vice Presidents.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

lawCode=HSC&sectionNum=118948). 111 See Jacob Shamsian, ‘Facebook’s head of policy says it would allow “denying the Holocaust” in the weeks before banning high-profile anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists’, Business Insider, 3 May 2019, https://www.insider.com/facebook-allows-holocaust-denial-anti-semitic-ban-2019-5. 112 Karen Zraick, ‘Mark Zuckerberg seeks to clarify remarks about Holocaust deniers after outcry’, New York Times, 18 July 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-holocaust-denial.html. 113 ‘Social media global revenue 2013–2019’, Statista, 14 July 2016, https://www.statista.com/statistics/562397/worldwide-revenue-from-social-media/. Note that the data for 2016–19 are forecasts rather than reports. 114 Jamil Zaki, ‘The Technology of Kindness’. 115 Mark Zuckerberg, ‘The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas’, Washington Post, 30 March 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mark-zuckerberg-the-internet-needs-new-rules-lets-start-in-these-four-areas/2019/03/29/9e6f0504-521a-11e9-a3f7-78b7525a8d5f_story.html. 116 ‘Australian government pushes through expansive new legislation targeting abhorrent violent material online’, Ashurst Media Update, 10 April 2019, https://www.ashurst.com/en/news-and-insights/legal-updates/media-update-new-legislation-targeting-abhorrent-violent-material-online/. 117 But vague phrasing may dull the legislation’s teeth.

And whilst I understand the reluctance of tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg to take on the role of arbiter, especially given the tradition of free speech that surrounds the United States’ First Amendment, social media platforms can’t market themselves as public squares, yet at the same time insist they have only limited responsibility for what goes on inside them. Especially as the big players already do take editorial decisions and are willing to impose a value judgement on some issues. For example, Facebook bans nudity often to absurd degrees.111 This is in marked contrast to Mark Zuckerberg’s position on Holocaust denial, say, of which he said, ‘At the end of the day I don’t believe that our platform should take that down.’

Indeed it appears that some of the world’s tech leaders have accepted that a certain volume of complaints, a certain level of fines, maybe even a certain number of deaths, is something they can tolerate when the prize is so big and so many billions of dollars in annual profits are at stake.113 In the same way that Big Tobacco determined it was acceptable to peddle a harmful product because the profits were so large, it seems that the social media giants have determined that the collateral damage they cause is an acceptable by-product of their business model. As Professor Zaki observed, ‘Mark Zuckerberg famously exhorted his employees to “move fast and break things”. By now, it’s clear they’ve broken quite a lot.’114 Leaving it to the platforms to self-regulate toxic content clearly hasn’t worked, as Mark Zuckerberg himself has now acknowledged.115 We need regulation with teeth to compel Big Tech to reform. The penalties handed out to date for failing to immediately remove unambiguously hateful content have been so low as to be meaningless in the context of Big Tech’s gargantuan, record-breaking profits.


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The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

It spied on: James Bamford, “The Most Wanted Man in the World,” Wired, August 2014. “bricked”: Ibid. Verizon, for example, was ordered: FISA court order, Docket BR 13-80, April 25, 2013. Cited in Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “The 10 Biggest Revelations from Edward Snowden’s Leaks,” Mashable, June 5, 2014. Online at mashable.com. Mark Zuckerberg taped over: Katie Rogers, “Mark Zuckerberg Covers His Laptop Camera. You Should Consider It, Too,” New York Times, June 22, 2016. high-tech companies were lobbying: Robin Blackburn, “The Corbyn Project,” New Left Review 111 (May–June 2018): 5–32. A 1992 Supreme Court decision: Christopher Caldwell, “Amazon’s Tax-Free Landscape Needs Bulldozing,” Financial Times, July 16–17, 2011.

“a capitalist venture”: Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A History (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 3. Eliot Spitzer’s father used part: Fred Siegel and Michael Goodwin, “Troopergate, New York–Style,” Weekly Standard, August 20–27, 2007. Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift: Alex Kotlowitz, “Getting Schooled,” New York Times Book Review, August 23, 2015. Until a court intervened: Valerie Strauss, “The Secret E-mails About Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 Million Donation to Newark Schools,” Washington Post, January 6, 2013. “We all pay”: Rob Reich, “What Are Foundations For?,” Boston Review, March 1, 2013. Online at bostonreview.net. Quoted in Gara LaMarche, “Democracy and the Donor Class,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, 34 (Fall 2014).

McNamara had won the esteem of the country’s leaders, and the authority to manage its now-nuclearized armed forces, on the strength of his corporate career. McNamara was not a sadistic military strategist, like William Tecumseh Sherman; he was a true believer in “systems management,” like, in a later era, Mark Zuckerberg. He took certain techniques useful for managing corporations and grievously misapplied them. In 1967, at the height of the war, McNamara told a convocation at recently integrated Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, that rational management, as he practiced it, was the only proper means of effecting humane change.


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Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

This included a user’s profile picture, name, gender, current city, what professional and regional “networks” one belonged to within Facebook, the “causes” one had signed on to support, and one’s entire list of Facebook friends. The changes were driven by Facebook’s need to monetize the service but were also consistent with founder Mark Zuckerberg’s strong personal conviction that people everywhere should be open about their lives and actions. In Iran, where authorities were known to be using information and contacts obtained from people’s Facebook accounts while interrogating Green Movement activists detained from the summer of 2009 onward, the implications of the new privacy settings were truly frightening.

Still, Tsui made an important point. Hundreds of millions of people “inhabit” Facebook’s digital kingdom. Call it Facebookistan. By mid-2011 Facebook had 700 million users. If it really were a country, it would be the world’s third largest, after India and China. The social network may have started out in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room as a platform for college students to flirt with one another, but it is now a world unto itself: an alternative virtual reality that for many users is now inextricably intertwined with their physical reality—and one that is often celebrated as a platform not only for personal expression but for political liberation.

There needs to be a mechanism that enables us to do this kind of work. Either Facebook is going to get it, or we’re going to be playing cat and mouse.” Fortunately for Egypt’s activists, the story ended well, at least in the short term, with the fall of the Mubarak regime. Wael Ghonim was soon lavishing praise on Mark Zuckerberg for having created the world’s greatest organizing tool for freedom and democracy. INSIDE THE LEVIATHAN Members of Facebook’s management team are adamant that the real-name requirement is key to protecting users from abusive and criminal behavior. Tim Sparapani, who worked for the American Civil Liberties Union before becoming Facebook’s public policy director, explained it to me this way: “Authenticity allows Facebook to be more permissive in terms of what we can allow people to say and do on the site.”


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Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, DevOps, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, minimum viable product, multi-armed bandit, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, working poor, Y Combinator, young professional

Ben Horowitz, “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager,” Andreessen Horowitz website (no exact date given), a16z.com/2012/06/15/good-product-managerbad-product-manager/. 5. Noah Kagan, “What Happens After You Get Shot Down by Mark Zuckerberg?” Fast Company, July 24, 2014, fastcompany.com/3033427/hit-the-ground-running/what-happens-after-you-get-shot-down-by-mark-zuckerberg. 6. Harry McCracken, “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Bold Plan for the Future of Facebook,” Fast Company, Long Read/Behind the Brand (blog), November 16, 2015. 7. “Fireside Chat: Defining True Growth—How Do You Find Your North Star Metric,” GrowthHackers, https://growthhackers.com/videos/gh-conference-16-fireside-chat-with-nate-moch-vp-product-teams-at-zillow-and-morgan-brown-coo-at-inman-news. 8.

The team was run by a hard-charging executive and former head of product marketing on the Facebook Platform and Ads products named Chamath Palihapitiya, who recommended to Mark Zuckerberg that he refocus his efforts on helping the site grow its number of users. Though Facebook, who had by this time about 70 million users, had already achieved remarkable growth, it looked like the company might be hitting a wall. So Mark Zuckerberg tasked the team to focus exclusively on experimenting with ways to break through that plateau. As the team racked up success after success, Zuckerberg saw that the investment in the new unit was paying off, and continued to add more manpower, enabling the team to experiment more and grow the site even faster.8 One of their biggest breakthroughs, the creation of a translation engine to spur international growth, provides a sharp contrast as to how the growth hacking method is so different from the traditional marketing approach.

In larger companies, which may have multiple growth teams, the teams should report to a vice president or C-level executive who can champion their work with the rest of the C-suite. Support for these methods at the highest rungs of the organization is critical to the team’s sustained success. Mark Zuckerberg is an outstanding model of the leadership required. He was relentlessly focused on growth in the early days of Facebook, and his enthusiasm hasn’t waned since. In 2005, two years before Facebook formally established the growth team, Noah Kagan, a digital marketer who was employee number 30, brought a revenue generating idea to Zuckerberg.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beveridge, William H. 1942. “Social Insurance and Allied Services.” Presented to Parliament, November 1942. http://pombo.free.fr/beve ridge42.pdf. Blake, Robert. 1966. Disraeli. London: Faber and Faber. Blodget, Henry. 2009. “Mark Zuckerberg on Innovation.” Business Insider, October 1. www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-innovation-2009-10. Bloom, Benjamin. 1984. “The Two Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Proof Instruction as Effective as One-To-One Tutoring.” Educational Researcher 13, no. 6: 4‒16. Bloom, Nicholas, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb. 2020.

There was no consultation with those whose freedom of speech and association, education, government jobs, ability to travel, and even likelihood of getting government services and housing are now being shaped by the system. This is not something that happens only in dictatorships. In 2018 Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company’s algorithm would be modified to give users “meaningful social interactions.” What this meant in practice was that the platform’s algorithm would prioritize posts from other users, especially family and friends, rather than news organizations and established brands.

Meanwhile, antiauthoritarianism morphed into a fascination with “disruption,” meaning that disrupting existing practices and livelihoods was welcome or even encouraged. The precise words differed, but the underlying thinking was reminiscent of British entrepreneurs in the early 1800s, who felt fully justified in ignoring any collateral damage they created along their path, especially on workers. Later, Mark Zuckerberg would make “Move fast and break things” a mantra for Facebook. An elitist approach came to dominate almost the entire industry. Software and programming were things in which very talented people excelled, and the less able were of limited use. Journalist Gregory Ferenstein interviewed dozens of tech start-up founders and leaders who expressed these opinions.


pages: 185 words: 43,609

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

12 Man and Machine 13 Seeing Green 14 The Founder’s Paradox Conclusion: Stagnation or Singularity? Acknowledgments Illustration Credits Index About the Authors Preface ZERO TO ONE EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

Their technology probably would have worked at scale, but it could have worked only at scale: it required every computer to join the network at the same time, and that was never going to happen. Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students—Mark Zuckerberg’s first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at all. 3. Economies of Scale A monopoly business gets stronger as it gets bigger: the fixed costs of creating a product (engineering, management, office space) can be spread out over ever greater quantities of sales.

When a big company makes an offer to acquire a successful startup, it almost always offers too much or too little: founders only sell when they have no more concrete visions for the company, in which case the acquirer probably overpaid; definite founders with robust plans don’t sell, which means the offer wasn’t high enough. When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.” Mark saw where he could take the company, and Yahoo! didn’t. A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.


pages: 281 words: 83,505

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

CONCLUSION: BEFORE WE LIFT THE NEXT SHOVEL “Are we building the world we all want?”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/​notes/​mark-zuckerberg/​building-global-community/​10154544292806634/. “That’s who we are”: See Tony Romm, “Trump Campaign Fires Back at Zuckerberg,” Politico, April 13, 2016, https://www.politico.com/​story/​2016/​04/​mark-zuckerberg-trump-feud-221897, and Seth Fiegerman, “Mark Zuckerberg Criticizes Trump on Immigration,” CNN, January 27, 2017, http://money.cnn.com/​2017/​01/​27/​technology/​zuckerberg-trump-immigration/​index.html. “engagement will go down”: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook post, January 11, 2018. https://www.facebook.com/​zuck/​posts/​10104413015393571/.

It blends climate adaptation with mitigation while also improving the quality of urban life, regardless of the weather, and giving the people fortunate enough to be near it a way to connect. The water is coming. With the right kind of social infrastructure, we may well get through it without building an ark. CONCLUSION Before We Lift the Next Shovel In February 2017, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a six-thousand-word open letter on the site he created. It’s addressed “To our community,” and within a few sentences Zuckerberg asks his company’s two billion or so users a straightforward question: “Are we building the world we all want?” The answer was self-evident. If there’s a core principle in Zuckerberg’s worldview, it’s that human beings make progress when we break down social and geographic divisions and form larger, more expansive moral communities.


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Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

“‘Seeing Someone Cry at Work Is Becoming Normal’: Employees Say Whole Foods Is Using ‘Scorecards’ to Punish Them.” Business Insider, February 1, 2018. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-whole-foods-uses-scorecards-to-punish-employees-2018-1. “Pirate Bay Founder: Mark Zuckerberg Is ‘Basically the Biggest Dictator in the World.’” Business Insider Nordic online. Last modified November 27, 2017. http://nordic.businessinsider.com/pirate-bay-founder-mark-zuckerberg-is-basically-the-biggest-dictator-in-the-world-2017-10. “SF Tent on Sidewalk Prohibition Has Been Enforced 152 Times.” Fox KTVU online. Last modified September 12, 2017. http://www.ktvu.com/news/sf-tent-on-sidewalk-prohibition-has-been-enforced-152-times.

In 2018, when Bezos went to Berlin to receive an award, hundreds of his own German workers showed up to protest. “We have an Amazon boss who wants to Americanize work relationships and take us back to the nineteenth century,” a union boss told Reuters. Second on the list was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose company employs “secret police” also known as the “rat-catching team,” to spy on workers, operating what the Guardian calls “a ruthless code of secrecy,” using legal threats to keep workers from talking about “working conditions, misconduct or culture challenges within the company.” The thirty-four-year-old wunderkind runs a social network with more than two billion members, and has become the most powerful person on the planet, Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, told CNN in 2018.

He tries to spend as much time at home as he can, which means, among other things, no crack-of-dawn power breakfasts, no work dinners, no pulling all-nighters. Being able to ease into the day at nine thirty on a nice day in June is part of the reason he started his own company. “The basic premise of being an entrepreneur,” Fried says, “is freedom. That’s why people start a business, for freedom.” These guys don’t want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. They think people who do are, well, kind of nuts. They spend a lot of time encouraging aspiring entrepreneurs to pursue a healthier approach to operating a company. It starts with treating your employees well and looking after them. It also means looking after yourself. Work fewer hours. Avoid stress.


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Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

This isn’t merely a story about science, technology, engineering, and math majors (STEM), because a lot of scientists aren’t getting jobs today, especially if they don’t do the “right” kind of science. Does anyone envy the job prospects of a typical newly minted astronomy PhD? On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame was a psychology major, and insights from psychology helped him make Facebook into a more appealing and alluring site. The ability to mix technical knowledge with solving real-world problems is the key, not sheer number-crunching or programming for its own sake. Number-crunching skills will be turned over to the machines sooner or later.

The Upper East Side does well, as does Scarsdale (a suburb of New York), Cupertino, and Potomac and Bethesda near Washington, D.C. This reflects how many of the very highest earners come from internet companies and finance, with some government and law thrown into the mix. There has been Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, but finance is a common source of riches within the very highest tier of earners. To give one extreme but illuminating example, in 2007 the top twenty-five hedge fund earners pulled in more income than all the CEOs of the S&P 500 put together. The modern financial sector has computers, computerized trading, arbitrage, super-rapid communications, and computerized risk assessment at its core.

If you are a talented twenty-two-year-old, just out of Harvard, you probably cannot walk into a furniture factory and quickly design a better machine. Young people have made fundamental contributions in some of the internet and social networking sectors, precisely because of the immaturity of those sectors. Mark Zuckerberg needed a good grasp of Myspace, but he didn’t have to master decades of previous efforts on online social networks. He was close to starting from scratch. In those cases, young people tend to dominate the sector, but of course that won’t cover the furniture factory. Now take a typical young person, not furniture-machine savvy but just out of Harvard with, say, a degree in economics.


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Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

If Rose was taken aback by how furious I was, he hid it well. Let me back up. I am a longtime tech investor and evangelist. Tech had been my career and my passion, but by 2016, I was backing away from full-time professional investing and contemplating retirement. I had been an early advisor to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—Zuck, to many colleagues and friends—and an early investor in Facebook. I had been a true believer for a decade. Even at this writing, I still own shares in Facebook. In terms of my own narrow self-interest, I had no reason to bite Facebook’s hand. It would never have occurred to me to be an anti-Facebook activist.

The most likely case is that the technology and business model of Facebook and others will continue to undermine democracy, public health, privacy, and innovation until a countervailing power, in the form of government intervention or user protest, forces change. * * * — TEN DAYS BEFORE the November 2016 election, I had reached out formally to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, two people I considered friends, to share my fear that bad actors were exploiting Facebook’s architecture and business model to inflict harm on innocent people, and that the company was not living up to its potential as a force for good in society.

—DAVID WONG I should probably tell the story of how I intersected with Facebook in the first place. In the middle of 2006, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, sent me an email stating that his boss was facing an existential crisis and required advice from an unbiased person. Would I be willing to meet with Mark Zuckerberg? Facebook was two years old, Zuck was twenty-two, and I was fifty. The platform was limited to college students, graduates with an alumni email address, and high school students. News Feed, the heart of Facebook’s user experience, was not yet available. The company had only nine million dollars in revenue in the prior year.


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The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

In 2000, a fleece sweatshirt offered in many different colors made Uniqlo a household name and set the stage for further expansion in Japan and around the world. Today, the company continues to grow its Uniqlo brand in international markets, with stores in New York and London. Mark Zuckerberg b. 1984, United States Facebook Mark Zuckerberg matriculated at Harvard University in 2002 and quickly built his reputation as one of the best computer programmers on campus. This caught the attention of a trio of students who were developing a match-making program. Zuckerberg joined the project, but soon left to team up with friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to develop the social network that would become Facebook.

As we began collecting data and conducting interviews it became almost immediately clear that a lot of the truisms that get touted as the keys to successful entrepreneurship didn’t stand up to the data we had. For instance: Age Our tech-dominated era—populated by savvy wunderkinder—has left the impression that most self-made billionaires cross that billion-dollar finish line early in their careers. While it is true that people like Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Mark Zuckerberg made their first billion while still quite young—and with the first companies they formed—the majority of people in our sample are like Dietrich Mateschitz, who didn’t hit the billion-dollar mark until well after his fortieth birthday. For more than 70 percent of the sample, the idea or transition that catapulted them to billion-dollar success happened after age thirty (see Figure 1-1).

Two years after starting Spanx, founder and Producer Sara Blakely handed the operations of the business over to Performer CEO Laurie Ann Goldman, who ran the company for twelve years. Bloomberg’s Producer Michael Bloomberg started the financial data giant with the technology Performer Tom Secunda at his side. In the technology world, these pairings are more public than elsewhere: there is Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (Producer) and Sheryl Sandberg (Performer), eBay’s Pierre Omidyar (Producer) and Meg Whitman (Performer), Microsoft’s Bill Gates (Producer) and Paul Allen (Performer), just to name a few. Sometimes these pairs seem destined to work together. The serial Producer Mark Cuban—cofounder of Broadcast.com and the current owner of the Dallas Mavericks—wrote about the Performer Martin Woodall, who was Cuban’s partner in MicroSolutions, his first multimillion-dollar business: “While I covered my mistakes by throwing time and effort at the problem, Martin was so detail-oriented, he had to make sure things were perfect so there would never be any problems.


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Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era? by David de Cremer

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bitcoin, blockchain, business climate, business process, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, future of work, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, race to the bottom, robotic process automation, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, Turing test, work culture , workplace surveillance , zero-sum game

Without a doubt you will remember the controversy in 2018 where it was revealed that the data of as many as 87 million Facebook users were accessed and used for both research and political purposes. The founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, received much criticism and people wondered whether he realized the importance of privacy to human users. Indeed, the end users here are humans, like you and me, so why was he being so inconsiderate in how their data was used? Was he not aware that he – as creator – was responsible not only for ensuring technological progress, but also for the welfare of his customers? To answer this question, let us rewind to June 2017, where Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview with Freakonomics Radio said: “Of course, privacy is extremely important, and people engage and share their content and feel free to connect because they know that their privacy is going to be protected [on Facebook].”

To answer this question, let us rewind to June 2017, where Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview with Freakonomics Radio said: “Of course, privacy is extremely important, and people engage and share their content and feel free to connect because they know that their privacy is going to be protected [on Facebook].” Great! The creator of Facebook knew that privacy matters to the human end user and should be treated with care. But, only one year later, it became clear that he was not really treating privacy and the value it carries for humans with much care. What became clear instead is that people like Mark Zuckerberg were primarily driven by the ambition to innovate and show off rapid technological development (remember how cool it makes your company), rather than thinking about the consequences it may have for the kind of society that will be created. Zuckerberg suffers from what I call an innovation only bias.²⁰⁴ He wants to innovate to serve the goal of innovation itself.

Such a bias can be called a blind spot, because it shows that if we are obsessed with creating something unique that seems to have almost unlimited possibilities, we only come to see the value of the innovation itself. And often the consequences revealed are to the detriment of its end user and society at large. This is exactly what happened in the case of Facebook. It was only when Mark Zuckerberg was forced by his court hearings to think about his own role in the technological innovation, that he realized he was also responsible for the consequences that a platform such as Facebook reveals to the welfare and interest of its human users. As he said: “I started [Facebook], I run it, I’m responsible for what happens here.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The bitcoin buzz in the air also electrified the Coinbase crew’s apartment-turned-office on Bluxome Street as a steady stream of bitcoin pilgrims dropped by. These included people who would go on to become some of the most famous figures in the crypto clique. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen came by, and so did Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the Harvard rowers who took a large legal settlement from Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook and plowed it into a bitcoin fortune. A visionary and crypto zealot named Balaji Srinivasan turned up. Craig and others thought he looked like a cross between a drug dealer and a street person with his torn Nikes and stained sweatpants, but they became transfixed.

Much bigger. 9 Brian Has a Master Plan Brian breathed a sigh of satisfaction as he clicked on “publish” and his blog post went live. It was September of 2016, a month after the Bitfinex hack, and he was wearing a plain black T-shirt. Like other Silicon Valley CEOs, he had taken on a distinct sartorial style as a type of self-branding. Brian’s style wasn’t as conspicuous as Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie or Steve Jobs’s turtleneck—an affect later copied by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Instead, Brian took to donning a simple T-shirt—usually black, sometimes white—for speeches and public appearances. It was a nod to simplicity and focus. Since founding Coinbase, Brian had kept his blog as a chronicle of product announcements, hiring milestones, and other signs of progress.

Since the beginning, he had fought time and again to exert total control over Coinbase, whether this meant nudging out his Y Combinator partner or dictating terms to the startup’s angel investors. And as Coinbase grew bigger, he turned to a new tactic to ensure he would keep that control. In Silicon Valley, executives like Mark Zuckerberg have discovered a way to ensure they are not just chief executives, but kings of the companies they found. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, used the same trick to stay in control, even as they distributed more and more of the company’s stock. The secret for staying in power involved creating a new class of shares with super voting rights.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

“A lot of what we have to deal with are issues and decisions that were made by people in generations before us.” Over the last three years, the quiet rumblings of generational change have become a deafening roar. You can hear it in the din of the crowds at campaign rallies, in the youthful voices singing at global climate marches, in the staticky silence after Mark Zuckerberg has to explain to retirement-age senators how Facebook makes money. You can sense it in the urgency around tackling police violence, the demands to address the student debt crisis, and the drumbeat of youth-led activism around reforming America’s gun laws. You can see it in the young mayors implementing progressive policies on the local level, in the first-time women candidates who seized congressional seats in the 2018 midterms, and in the surprise momentum behind the presidential aspirations of a thirty-eight-year-old Indiana mayor.

Pete was a dorky kid, with a chubby face and a smile that actually turned up at the edges, like something drawn by Dr. Seuss. He was one of the only freshman kids at Harvard from South Bend, Indiana, and when he first arrived he felt as if he were entering an X-Men universe where everyone else had superpowers. Some kids at Harvard were tech wizards (like Mark Zuckerberg, who lived a few dorms over in Kirkland House), others were artistic prodigies (like his roommate Uzo, better known as Uzodinma Iweala, who wrote the bestselling novel Beasts of No Nation while still in college), and others were so rich and connected they might as well have been born wearing tuxedos.

Still, even if millennials are better at metabolizing online information than their parents, the spread and weaponization of misleading information will likely be a permanent feature of millennial political life. The demise of the old gatekeepers led to the rise of a new kind of archetype: the disrupter. The infinite new opportunities in the digital space and the thrilling freedom of a vast, unregulated digital ecosystem gave young upstarts the courage to, as Mark Zuckerberg put it, “move fast and break things.” Why should they respect the old ways when this was a whole new world? The future, they thought, belonged to the innovator, the coder, the breaker of rules, not the cog in some outdated machine. So it’s probably not a coincidence that individualistic millennials raised in this bold new world had little reverence for the institutions of the old one: they became more skeptical than older Americans of organized religion, political parties, corporations, and labor unions.


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The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Chow-White (New York: Routledge, 2011). 13. Amy Lee, “Myspace Collapse: How the Social Network Fell Apart,” Huffington Post, June 30, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/​2011/​06/​30/​how-myspace-fell-apart_n_887853.html. 14. Fred Vogelstein, “The Wired Interview: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg,” Wired, June 29, 2009, http://www.wired.com/​2009/​06/​mark-zuckerberg-speaks/. 15. Zeynep Tufekci, “Grooming, Gossip, Facebook and Myspace,” Information, Communication & Society, 11 (2008), 546, doi: 10.1080/13691180801999050. 16. Larry Dignan, “Facebook’s IPO: Massive Valuation Brings Business Model Scrutiny,” May 16, 2012, http://www.cnet.com/​news/​facebooks-ipo-massive-valuation-brings-business-model-scrutiny/. 17.

“We’ve been in touch with the Undergraduate Council, and this is a very high priority for the College,” said Harvard’s residential computing director in mid-2004. “We have every intention of completing the facebook by the end of the spring semester.”1 So Harvard computer services had an idea and they were running with it. But a nineteen-year-old undergraduate named Mark Zuckerberg—a gifted programmer in full possession of all the arrogance of youth, who loved nothing more than to hack out code overnight—felt compelled to show he could do the job better and faster. Zuckerberg had already accomplished a number of complicated computer projects with his friends. “We were just building stuff,” he said later, “ ’cause we thought it was cool.”

Amazingly, it was information that users were all handing over for free, because, well, everyone else was, too. The power of networks. The madness of crowds. Zuckerberg, like Google’s founders, understood advertising’s potential to degrade his product; he had the technologist’s wariness of advertising and its tendency to ruin websites. As with Larry Page, so with Mark Zuckerberg, the Holy Grail was advertising that people actually wanted to see; Facebook figured that nanotargeting could make that happen. Until then, Zuckerberg would remain manifestly averse to anything that might interrupt the experience of his users. When, early on, Sprite offered $1 million to turn the site green for a day, he didn’t even consider it.


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Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

The Law and Economics of Residential Stability,” Yale Law Journal 127 (2017). 9. Jeff Abbott, “Indigenous Weavers Organize for Collective Intellectual Property Rights,” Waging Nonviolence (July 17, 2017). 10. Richard Feloni, “Why Mark Zuckerberg Wants Everyone to Read the Fourteenth-Century Islamic Book The Muqaddimah,” Business Insider (June 2, 2015); Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community” (February 16, 2017), facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634. 11. I have been a guest speaker at Singularity University’s Global Solutions Program. 12. Peter Diamandis, “I Am Peter Diamandis, from XPRIZE, Singularity University, Planetary Resources, Human Longevity Inc., and More.

A Bitcoin-based charity in Florida bought a nine-acre forest as a sanctuary for the homeless; Wired deemed Bitcoin “the great equalizer” for its potential to put financial services in the hands of the poor. It also attracted the interest of such innovation-hungry investors as the Winklevoss twins, Mark Zuckerberg’s old nemeses. Bill Gates called it “better than currency.” But soon the Bitcoin revolution began to look more and more like the system it was intended to replace—except perhaps more centralized, less egalitarian, and similarly clogged with unseemly interests.5 As the value of bitcoins swelled against the dollar over the course of 2013, a mining arms race began.

Together, we are writing the next social contracts as we go, deciding what goes in and what we ignore. Yet the questions that the cooperative movement persisted in raising for generations have too often been neglected: Who owns the engines of the economy, and how are they governed? In early 2017, Facebook CEO (and Ibn Khaldun enthusiast) Mark Zuckerberg posted a nearly 6,000-word letter called “Building Global Community.” The name Trump doesn’t appear in it, but it’s hard not to read as a postmortem on the election several months before, in whose aftermath Facebook came under scrutiny for enabling foreign interventions to spread. “Democracy is receding in many countries,” Zuckerberg observed, “and there is a large opportunity across the world to encourage civic participation.”


Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Things were not that different in the more recent gold rush. The Valley was always a region dominated by men, from William Hewlett, Dave Packard, Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak to, decades later, in the twenty-first century, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Travis Kalanick, and Marc Benioff. Mary Jane, fueled by peanut butter sandwiches packed in wax paper for the two-day journey, was under no illusion that it would be easy to navigate the old boys’ club of Sand Hill Road and Silicon Valley. Even today, decades after Mary Jane first arrived, 94 percent of investing partners at venture capital firms—the financial decision makers shaping the future—are men, and more than 80 percent of venture firms have never had a woman investing partner.

They hoped to meet with former LinkedIn employee Matt Cohler, now Facebook’s vice president of product management. Arriving at the office, Kevin and Arthur found Cohler and Dustin Moskovitz struggling to assemble Ikea furniture. The office was a mess. The men were directed to the conference room, where they were surprised a few minutes later by the appearance of Facebook’s co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and its president Sean Parker, holding burritos. Parker was an entrepreneur with a colorful track record. He had co-founded Napster, the music file-sharing site that had had a spectacular rise before an ignominious fall at the hands of the Recording Industry Association of America on copyright infringement charges.

Benioff had come a long way from their exploratory lunch on the country club terrace in San Mateo, when he had asked her, “Should I do this?” and “Can I do this on my own?” Magdalena, without hesitating, had answered in the affirmative. Long before just about anyone else, she had seen the clouds gathering, pointing to the future. THERESIA In the Monday partners’ meeting at Accel, Theresia filed away Mark Zuckerberg’s “I’m CEO, Bitch” business card without comment and got out her sequentially dated and coded notebook and mechanical pencil in preparation for the all-important sit-down with the Facebook team. In addition to Theresia, seated around the table on the Accel side were Kevin Efrusy, Jim Breyer, Peter Wagner, Peter Fenton, and Ping Li, who had been hired as a principal six months earlier.


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21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Knopf, 2016). 3 Cara McGoogan, ‘How to See All the Terrifying Things Google Knows about You’, Telegraph, 18 August 2017; Caitlin Dewey, ‘Everything Google Knows about You (and How It Knows It)’, Washington Post, 19 November 2014. 4 Dan Bates, ‘YouTube Is Losing Money Even Though It Has More Than 1 Billion Viewers’, Daily Mail, 26 February 2015; Olivia Solon, ‘Google’s Bad Week: YouTube Loses Millions As Advertising Row Reaches US’, Guardian, 25 March 2017; Seth Fiegerman, ‘Twitter Is Now Losing Users in the US’, CNN, 27 July 2017. 5. Community 1 Mark Zuckerberg, ‘Building Global Community’, Facebook, 16 February 2017. 2 John Shinal, ‘Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook can play a role that churches and Little League once filled’, CNBC, 26 June 2017. 3 Shinal, ‘Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook can play a role’, op. cit; John Shinal, ‘Zuckerberg says Facebook has a new missioin as it deals with fake news and hate speech,’ CNBC, 22 June 2017. 4 Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 5 See, for example, Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London: Penguin, 2017). 6 For a general survey and critique see: Derek Y.

Once politicians can press our emotional buttons directly, generating anxiety, hatred, joy and boredom at will, politics will become a mere emotional circus. As much as we should fear the power of big corporations, history suggests that we are not necessarily better off in the hands of over-mighty governments. As of March 2018, I would prefer to give my data to Mark Zuckerberg than to Vladimir Putin (though the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that perhaps there isn’t much of a choice here, as any data entrusted to Zuckerberg may well find its way to Putin). Private ownership of one’s own data may sound more attractive than either of these options, but it is unclear what it actually means.

Perhaps the very same scientists and entrepreneurs who disrupted the world in the first place could engineer some technological solution? For example, might networked algorithms form the scaffolding for a global human community that could collectively own all the data and oversee the future development of life? As global inequality rises and social tensions increase around the world, perhaps Mark Zuckerberg could call upon his 2 billion friends to join forces and do something together? PART II The Political Challenge The merger of infotech and biotech threatens the core modern values of liberty and equality. Any solution to the technological challenge has to involve global cooperation. But nationalism, religion and culture divide humankind into hostile camps and make it very difficult to cooperate on a global level. 5 COMMUNITY Humans have bodies California is used to earthquakes, but the political tremor of the 2016 US elections still came as a rude shock to Silicon Valley.


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They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

On the continued interventions in 2018, see Jonathan Albright, “Facebook and the 2018 Midterms: A Look at the Data,” Medium, November 4, 2018, available at link #139. In March 2019, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook would shift its focus to emphasize user privacy more. What was not clear from the announcement was how the shift would affect the business model of advertising—or whether it would at all. See Mark Zuckerberg, “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking,” Facebook, March 6, 2019, available at link #140. See also Mike Issac, “Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Says He’ll Shift Focus to Users’ Privacy,” New York Times, March 6, 2019, available at link #141. 117.Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 509.

As a story in early 2019 reported, TV sets are increasingly cheap because the manufacturers are now selling the data about what we watch.90 TV is still a relatively anonymous zone, but if the Internet is any lesson, it won’t be for very long. It took a long time for Americans to understand this basic fact about the Internet economy. Even in 2018, Senator Orrin Hatch had no clue about it, asking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “So, how do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”91 For much of the early 2000s, many Americans believed that they were just getting great stuff for free, because the tech companies wanted to gain a huge market share. What they would do with that market share no one quite knew.

The nudge economy is just being born, and the ethics of nudge are complex.109 But put aside the question of how the data is collected—important and difficult but beyond the scope of this book. Focus instead on how the data that is collected gets used. What is the use that we can rightly complain about? From Facebook’s perspective, this issue is solely about its customers. Is it giving its customers what its customers want? If it is, then no harm, no foul. That’s how Mark Zuckerberg defended his company in the Wall Street Journal. Our job is to serve, Zuckerberg all but said. What could possibly be wrong with that?110 That is a critically important perspective. Critically, though, it is not the only perspective. Besides the Facebook customers, there is the democracy that Facebook operates within—and affects profoundly.


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The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

Zoe Schiffer, ‘Apple Employees Push Back Against Returning to the Office in Internal Letter’, Verge, 4 June 2021, https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/4/22491629/apple-employees-push-back-return-office-internal-letter-tim-cook 18. ‘Machines Will Do More Tasks Than Humans by 2025: WEF’, Phys.org, 17 September 2018, https://phys.org/news/2018-09-machines-tasks-humans-wef.html 19. Scott Stein, ‘Virtual Mark Zuckerberg Showed Me Facebook’s New VR Workplace’, Cnet, 19 August 2021, https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/virtual-mark-zuckerberg-showed-me-facebooks-new-vr-workplace-solution/ 20. Attributed to film director Woody Allen variously as 80 per cent and 90 per cent. 21. Adam Grant, ‘Productivity Isn’t About Time Management. It’s About Attention Management’, New York Times, 28 March 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/smarter-living/productivity-isnt-about-time-management-its-about-attention-management.html 22.

In the summer of 2021 Google faced significant employee discontent when it announced that it intended to use its pay calculator to implement pay according to proximity to the office, reflecting the priority some employers still put on presenteeism.21 This strategy is risky and unfair as Sarah O’Connor commented in the Financial Times: If two workers from the same head office want to switch to working from home, but one inherited a house in an expensive city while the other had been living in a commuter town, is it fair for the latter to take a pay cut?22 She quoted Mark Zuckerberg of Meta telling his employees by video: ‘We’ll adjust salary to location… There’ll be severe ramifications for people who are not honest about this.’ But who is not being honest? Some companies are clearly struggling to accept the serious shift in mindset and values of their talent. It remains to be seen whether management will rise to the challenges of supporting home-based working or continue to believe they can persuade and cajole workers to be present in the office when they don’t want to be.

See Martin Wolf, The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned – and Have Still to Learn – from the Financial Crisis (Allen Lane, 2014) 11. Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (Granta, 2011) 12. The metaverse of virtual reality became thrown into the public spotlight at the end of 2021 when Facebook’s parent company name was rebranded by Mark Zuckerberg as ‘Meta’. The original phrase was coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, The Snow Crash; Daniel Villareal, ‘What is “Snow Crash”? Twitter Compares Facebook’s “Metaverse” Announcement to ’90s Novel’, Newsweek, 28 October 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/what-snow-crash-twitter-compares-facebooks-metaverse-announcement-90s-dystopian-sci-fi-1643690 13.


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The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, January 2017: Charlie Rose, interview with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, Columbia University, January 2017. Elon Musk, February, 2017: Chris Weller, “Elon Musk Doubles Down on Universal Basic Income: ‘It’s Going to Be Necessary,’” Business Insider, February 13, 2017. Mark Zuckerberg, May 2017: Mark Zuckerberg, commencement speech, Harvard University, May 2017. … adopting it would permanently grow the economy by 12.56 to 13.10 percent…: Michalis Nikiforos, Marshall Steinbaum, and Gennaro Zezza, “Modeling the Macroeconomic Effects of a Universal Basic Income,” Roosevelt Institute, August 29, 2017

Bill Gates, January 2017: “A problem of excess [automation] forces us to look at the individuals affected and take those extra resources and make sure they’re directed to them in terms of re-education and income policies…” (Gates later suggested taxing robots.) Elon Musk, February, 2017: “I think we’ll end up doing universal basic income… It’s going to be necessary… There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. I want to be clear. These are not things I wish will happen; these are things I think probably will happen.” Mark Zuckerberg, May 2017: “We should explore… universal basic income so that everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.” My mom, September 2017: “If you think it’s a good idea, Andy, I’m sure it’s a good idea.” You may be thinking, This will never happen. And if it did, wouldn’t it cause runaway inflation? Enable generations of wastrels?

Max Ventilla, the founder and CEO of AltSchool, has said that “the worst use of software in [education] is in replacement of humans… that’s craziness… It’s about the relationship that kids have with their peers, with adults. That’s what creates the motivation that creates the learning.” AltSchool is a company founded in 2014 to personalize education for all children across the country. AltSchool has raised over $175 million from Mark Zuckerberg, Emerson Collective, and others. It has opened six schools that collectively serve hundreds of elementary school students in San Francisco and New York. It employs more than 50 engineers who are developing tools each day that teachers request. The school uses video cameras to monitor tiny student interactions for playback.


pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

In the wake of various privacy scandals at Facebook – among a relentless wave of bad PR over extremism, its corporate culture, censorship, and more – there’s no shortage of people who would like to see its CEO Mark Zuckerberg similarly humbled. That’s not intrinsically wrong: the people at the top of the pyramid rarely face anything like the same kinds of consequences for their actions that the rest of us do. But tarring and feathering the odd executive won’t change the system. We need to think bigger than that. We need to become systems thinkers. We can’t think about tackling Mark Zuckerberg, or even tackling Facebook, or social networking. The physical architecture of the internet is a network of networks.

But it’s these things that shape the real internet – the big four tech giants are products of all of these factors. Looking into the architecture of the internet – who built it, who governs it, how it works, and who funds it – becomes, then, a way of looking at the real power structure of a huge swathe of the modern world. While we might think of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos or the other charismatic dotcom CEOs as the new rulers of the world, they’re just the tip of an iceberg. It’s time to see what lies beneath. I am at my very core a creature of the internet. My earliest childhood had computers hooked up via creaking modems to the bulletin boards that were the precursor of the popular web.

Whereas, for the most part … we never really trusted the cable company.’ The same is true – for Eliason at least – about the people who make the decisions which shape their respective companies. We talk about the CEO/founders of the tech giants as if they have unprecedented power over their businesses. And it’s true that Mark Zuckerberg has created a structure that gives him control of Facebook’s voting shares15 – but Comcast, founded by its current CEO’s father, has it written into its articles of incorporation that Brian Roberts shall be chair and CEO for so long as he lives and wants the job.16 There is, it seems, nothing new under the son.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

You’ll remember the rest, and you might even remember being mildly irritated by having your social media feed utterly dominated by it that summer. From its launch in Frates’s Boston, the challenge circumnavigated the world, bringing in celebrities, politicians, sports stars, and everyday people, from Oprah and Mark Zuckerberg to a 102-year-old British great-grandfather, Jack Reynolds, the oldest person to take the challenge. “It was very chilly—in fact it was bloody cold, especially just in Union Jack boxer shorts,” Reynolds remarked. “But some lovely women with a warm towel and a shot of Grouse whisky soon warmed me up!”

The platform owner or platform steward: The company Reddit Inc. is the platform owner for Reddit. It sets the overarching rules. It owns the brand’s IP and pockets the ad revenue. Victoria Taylor worked for Reddit Inc. To take some other examples, Airbnb’s platform owner is Airbnb Inc. Facebook’s is Facebook Inc. (and, in effect, Mark Zuckerberg himself, who retains effective control of the company). Likewise, Wikipedia, which might feel “ownerless” to its users, is in fact governed and controlled by a board with the power to fundamentally alter its superstructure and rules, something its volunteer editors and users can’t do. Platform owners have the ability to control—or at least substantially influence—who is allowed to participate in the platform, its governance and decision-making; how value is distributed; and even whether the platform lives or dies.

The production values were gorgeous; the cinematic storytelling was worthy of Russell’s film school training. The call to action accompanying the video was smart and, at the time, a real innovation. The founders set up a website making it easy to tweet at “20 culture makers and 12 policymakers to use their power for good.” They asked the public to call on people like Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Bieber, Bill O’Reilly, and Oprah to help “make Kony famous.” The video was seeded and propelled by the existing Invisible Children community, and especially its fervent teenage and mainly female fan base. Its hard work over eight years had seemed to pay off; when it mattered, the fans had shown up to promote the cause.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Instead, truth and intelligence are things to be hoarded and exploited to the maximum. Business starts to take on the air of a military campaign, in which subterfuge and deception are key weapons, and the aim is to destroy rivals in the field. In Thiel’s eyes world-changing founders, such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, are willing to exploit their secret to its ultimate conclusion, to the point of destroying all competition. If monopoly seems unfair or threatening, as economists and regulators have traditionally argued, Thiel’s answer is brutal: “competition is for losers.” The triumphant entrepreneur becomes a Napoleonic figure, who changes the world through sheer force of will.

As he wrote in the early 1930s: As military action must be taken in a given strategic position even if all the data potentially procurable are not available, so also in economic life action must be taken without working out all the details of what is to be done. Here the success of everything depends upon intuition.9 Anticipating contemporary fascination with the personalities of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, Schumpeter was intrigued by the exceptional psychological attributes of these characters. It wasn’t just money that motivated them, but “the will to conquer: the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others,” he suggested.10 Austrian economics, as it became known, sought to channel the aristocratic, military ethos into the realm of entrepreneurial combat, and the state needed to stand well back.

The main center of these Napoleonic disruptors is Silicon Valley, where the goal is to establish a global nervous system with even greater sensitivity to our feelings than the free market. 7 WAR OF WORDS From “facts” to “data” During a question-and-answer session hosted on Facebook in June 2015, Mark Zuckerberg outlined a startling vision of where his company was heading. “One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology,” he said. “You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you’d like.


pages: 332 words: 97,325

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross

affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator

Jessica Mah, “Culture and Purpose from the Start,” Jessica Mah Meets World blog, June 11, 2010, http://jessicamah.com/blog-23-1. The quotation comes from the final paragraph of the long post. A slightly different version of the same paragraph is included earlier in the post. 10. E. B. Boyd, “Where Is the Female Mark Zuckerberg?” San Francisco, December 2011 [posted online November 22, 2011], www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/where-the-female-mark-zuckerberg. Earlier in the year, Aileen Lee, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, had published on TC a widely read essay, “Why Women Rule the Internet,” in which she argued that a new batch of e-commerce companies were springing up that addressed female consumers and that a majority of users of Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, and Twitter were female.

Three weeks into the summer, Mah described the culture that she and Su were creating: “InDinero is actually like a family. We cook and clean for each other, treat each other like playful siblings, work as hard as you’d expect from a group of Asian immigrants.”9 Shortly after YC concluded, inDinero raised $1.2 million. • “Where is the female Mark Zuckerberg?” asked San Francisco magazine in a cover story that ran in late 2011. “For the first time in startup history,” the article asserted, “girl wonders actually have an edge over the boys.” Leah Busque, founder of TaskRabbit, was featured, and shorter profiles were provided of more than two dozen others, including Alexa Andrzejewski of Foodspotting, and Susan Feldman and Alison Pincus of One Kings Lane.

But she wonders why it is that someone like twenty-six-year-old Aaron Levie, founder and still chief executive of Box, an online storage service like Dropbox, can brush aside any suggestion that he step aside. “I’ve always wanted to build companies,” Boyd quotes Levie. “The best way to keep me super excited is to keep me in the driver’s seat.” Why do the boys get to stay in the driver’s seat and the girls do not? • It is a few weeks since the “Where Is the Female Mark Zuckerberg?” article appeared. When Paul Graham sits down in the New York studio of Bloomberg TV for an interview, he finds himself fielding a barrage of questions from reporter Emily Chang about what should be done to increase the numbers of women and minorities in tech startups.11 He begins by saying that the makeup of a YC batch reflects that of the applicant pool.


pages: 411 words: 98,128

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

That’s little solace, however, to those who have been crushed by Amazon’s wheel as well as to the politicians who represent them. A rising tide of political antipathy toward Amazon could someday dramatically alter its trajectory. Bezos is not alone in displaying big tech hubris. Other Internet titans, such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Uber’s cofounder and ex-CEO Travis Kalanick, and Google’s cofounder and CEO Larry Page at times have displayed the same Silicon Valley social blindness. All are brilliant technologists who feel more comfortable with things they can quantify rather than with things they can’t, such as human emotions.

In a statement Sanders released around the same time he introduced his Stop BEZOS bill, he said: “At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when the three wealthiest people in America own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent and when 52 percent of all new income goes to the top one percent, the American people are tired of subsidizing multi-billionaires who own some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America.” Sanders had a point. Consider that as of early 2019, Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg together were worth $357 billion. They could write a $1,000 check to every man, woman, and child in America and still be multibillionaires. The kind of income inequality Sanders was talking about was starkly profiled in a 2018 article by the New York Times. Karleen Smith, who once worked as a clerk at Macy’s in the Landmark Mall outside Washington, D.C., has now taken up residence in her former store, which has been turned into a homeless shelter.

In essence, with a UBI the federal government steps in and pays every American a basic wage to make up for the disruption that technology is about to wreak on the job market. Bezos, who has libertarian leanings, hasn’t made up his mind yet on a UBI. In general, he is a social progressive who is not politically outspoken and has limited his public advocacy. That puts him at odds with his fellow tech titans, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his cofounder Chris Hughes, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, all of whom support some form of a universal basic income. The UBI is simply a logical response to a socially and politically complex problem. It’s designed to make sure that those holding jobs that will be disrupted by technology will have enough money to retrain for a new job or, if untrainable, survive on minimum-wage jobs.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Chapter Nine Peter Thiel, Y Combinator, and the Valley’s Youth Revolt Toward the end of 2004, Sequoia’s investment team assembled for an intriguing meeting. Roelof Botha, a thirty-one-year-old partner, had arranged for a visit from an even younger entrepreneur, a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg. These days, Sequoia realized, startup founders could be very young; this Zuckerberg was only twenty. In the new era of software ventures, entrepreneurs just needed a mastery of code, an idea for a product, and a maniacal focus. The meeting was set for 8:00 a.m. At 8:05 a.m., Zuckerberg had not shown up.

Sometimes he didn’t show up for work.[7] When he did appear, he was not always constructive; “he’s bringing a bunch of girls back to the office because he can show them he’s a startup founder,” one of his two co-founders grumbled.[8] In April 2004, Sequoia and the other Plaxo investors weighed in. To the relief of the co-founders, they fired Parker from his own company.[9] After Sequoia wielded the ax, Parker embarked on his fourth act: he was nothing if not resilient. Hearing of Facebook’s conquest of the campuses, he emailed Mark Zuckerberg with an offer to introduce him to investors. The pair had dinner in New York and found they had plenty in common: two ambitious young founders who had launched experiments in online social networking. When Zuckerberg moved out to Palo Alto in June 2004 with a few friends, the guys rented a ranch-style house a block from where Parker was living.

Not surprisingly, the speakers often amplified Graham’s own views. One visitor presented a slide with a discussion question for the group: “VCs: soulless agents of Satan, or just clumsy rapists?”[73] A couple of years later, when Y Combinator had established itself in Palo Alto, Graham invited none other than Mark Zuckerberg to speak at an event at Stanford. The veteran of the Wirehog presentation stood up and voiced the shared conviction of the rising generation: “Young people are just smarter.”[74] Coming on the heels of Masayoshi Son’s growth checks, the spread of Bechtolsheim-type angels, and Peter Thiel’s hands-off investing, Y Combinator represented yet another challenge to traditional venture capital.


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The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

You can carve out a similar professional niche in the job market by making choices that make you different from the smart people around you. Matt Cohler, now a partner at Benchmark Capital, spent six years in his late twenties and early thirties being a lieutenant to CEOs at LinkedIn (me) and Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg). Most supertalented people want to be the front man; few play the consigliere role well. In other words, there’s less competition and significant opportunity to be an all-star right-hand man. Matt excelled at this role, building a portfolio of accomplishments and relationships along the way.

But in fact, each move made sense given the interplay of her assets, aspirations, and the market realities. Her honed management skills would be useful for a fast-growing company; her economics background would help develop a sales model for a new type of online advertising; and Google’s mission was rooted in making the world a better place. After six years at Google, Mark Zuckerberg hired Sheryl to be COO at Facebook, where she remains today. What Flickr and Sheryl have in common is that they each challenge common assumptions about the path to success. Flickr contradicts the idea that winning start-ups come out of nowhere and ride the founders’ brilliant idea to take over the world.

The strength of the cofounders and early employees reflects the individual strength of the CEO; that’s why investors don’t evaluate the CEO in isolation from his or her team. Vinod Khosla, cofounder of Sun Microsystems and a Silicon Valley investor, says, “The team you build is the company you build.” Mark Zuckerberg says he spends half his time recruiting. Just as entrepreneurs are always recruiting and building a team of stunning people, you want to always be investing in your professional network to grow the start-up that is your career. Quite simply, if you want to accelerate your career, you need the help and support of others.


pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

Facebook already is positioning itself to crush the young company. Imran Khan, the company’s chief strategy officer, claimed: “Snapchat is a camera company. It is not a social company.” I don’t know if it’s the scorn the Zuck feels after Evan rejected his overtures about acquisition, or a warranted response to a threat. But I believe the first thing Mark Zuckerberg thinks when he opens his eyes in the morning, and the last as he closes them at night, is: “We’re going to wipe Snap Inc. off the face of the planet.” And he will. Zuckerberg understands images are Facebook’s killer app, much of it residing in the Instagram wing of his social empire. We absorb imagery sixty thousand times faster than words.24 So, images make a beeline for the heart.

Soon, other tech companies, including the Four, were plowing research into the technology. Nobody wanted to sleep through the Next Big Thing. Virtual reality is the mother of all head fakes. The most powerful force in the universe is regression to the mean. Everyone dies, and gets it wrong along the way. Mark Zuckerberg has been (very) right about a lot of things and was due to make an enormously bad call. And he has. Technology firms do not (yet) have the skills to shape people’s decisions on what to wear in public. People care (a lot) about their looks. Most don’t want to look like they’ve never kissed a girl.

Did Amazon need a $1 billion government subsidy? By purposefully managing their business at breakeven, Amazon has built a firm approaching half a trillion dollars in value, that has paid little corporate income tax. Facebook: Nobody wants to be seen as a company not on board with Facebook. Old CEOs want to put Mark Zuckerberg on stage with his hoodie. It doesn’t matter that he is neither charming nor a good speaker—he’s the equivalent of skinny jeans and makes every company that tries on Facebook look younger. Sheryl Sandberg also has been key—she’s hugely likable, and is seen as the archetype of the modern, successful woman: “Hey everybody!


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

The more we comment and share, the more we rate and like, the more economic value is accumulated by those who control the platforms on which our interactions take place.11 Taking this argument one step further, a frustrated minority have complained that we are living in a world of “digital feudalism,” where sites like Facebook and Tumblr offer up land for content providers to work while platform owners expropriate value with impunity and, if you read the fine print, stake unprecedented claim over users’ creations.12 “By turn, we are the heroic commoners feeding revolutions in the Middle East and, at the same time, ‘modern serfs’ working on Mark Zuckerberg’s and other digital plantations,” Marina Gorbis of the Institute for the Future has written. “We, the armies of digital peasants, scramble for subsistence in digital manor economies, lucky to receive scraps of ad dollars here and there, but mostly getting by, sometimes happily, on social rewards—fun, social connections, online reputations.

Almost twenty years later, these sentiments were echoed by Google’s Eric Schmidt and the State Department’s Jared Cohen, who partnered to write The New Digital Age: “The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history,” they insist. It is “the world’s largest ungoverned space,” one “not truly bound by terrestrial laws.” While openness has many virtues, it is also undeniably ambiguous. Is open a means or an end? What is open and to whom? Mark Zuckerberg said he designed Facebook because he wanted to make the world more “open and connected,” but his company does everything it can to keep users within its confines and exclusively retains the data they emit. Yet this vagueness is hardly a surprise given the history of the term, which was originally imported from software production: the designation “open source” was invented to rebrand free software as business friendly, foregrounding efficiency and economic benefits (open as in open markets) over ethical concerns (the freedom of free software).16 In keeping with this transformation, openness is often invoked in a way that evades discussions of ownership and equity, highlighting individual agency over commercial might and ignoring underlying power imbalances.

Facebook executives met with emissaries from various companies to figure out how to better serve them, including letting advertisers see more of what users are doing and saying. Their clients seem pleased: Ford and Coca-Cola have stated that the collaboration has had a positive impact on sales, and Facebook’s stock has risen accordingly.27 We want to make it “easier for marketers to reach their customers,” Mark Zuckerberg assured investors in late 2012, right around the time it was revealed that Facebook was working with a company called Datalogix to track what users bought offline, in brick-and-mortar stores, to provide an even more granular view of user habits.28 As the company works to match promotional messages with people, the trick, according to the Times, “is to avoid violating its users’ perceived sense of privacy or inviting regulatory scrutiny.”29 We are witnessing the beginning of a “revolution in the ways marketers and media intrude in—and shape—our lives,” Joseph Turow, author of The Daily You, has written.30 Yet despite all the democratic rhetoric about the Internet empowering consumers, it is clear that this revolution is not of the bottom-up variety.


pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

But the herd needed new blood. If Jake was as good as he seemed, he could bring not only new energy but potentially more recruits. Jake soon gave some evidence of being a good bet. His press clippings were astonishing, including a 2010 Rolling Stone profile that called him “a bizarro version of Mark Zuckerberg” and the leading spreader of “the gospel of anonymity.” Inside cDc, Jake handled himself differently than the others, arguing more fiercely and sometimes with disdain for his elders. That accelerated after he hooked up with something even bigger than Tor: WikiLeaks. Activist hackers started the site in 2006 and first won wide attention in 2010, when they posted a video called “Collateral Murder” that captured the gunfire from a US helicopter that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, in Iraq.

Beto’s technological savvy, while not in the same league as Mudge’s or Christien Rioux’s, put him way ahead of the average member of Congress on the subject and helped him appeal to younger voters as well as those increasingly concerned about tech threatening privacy and traditional jobs while spreading falsehoods. Certainly, he was a sharp contrast to those members of Congress who questioned Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and stumbled over such basic concepts as its advertising-dependent business model and how Facebook differed from Twitter. Beto’s familiarity with tech also helped him reach funders in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. cDc members quietly whispered about his history to a few of the most trustworthy and wealthy tech people they knew.

Executives above him repeatedly minimized the Russian activity in his public reports. When he briefed Facebook’s board about what he had found in September 2017, the directors asked him if he had successfully rooted out all of the stealth accounts. He answered, truthfully, that he had not. The board members then grilled CEO Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg about why they hadn’t told them how bad it was. Sandberg paid the tongue-lashing forward, yelling at Stamos: “You threw us under the bus!” Stamos never controlled all of the security apparatus at the company, and the board flare-up cemented his reputation for being overly aggressive.


pages: 251 words: 80,831

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

—CHUCK PALAHNIUK, SURVIVOR Years ago, when I was starting my first company, my idea of a successful startup mostly came from movies I’d watched, articles I’d read, and the ever-present popular mythology of famous companies. Facebook’s story made me believe that most successful founders start when they are in college, as Mark Zuckerberg did. Apple’s story made me believe that you needed two co-founders, one technical genius and one business visionary to become super successful (it wasn’t until much later that I learned Apple actually had a third co-founder at the very beginning). Billion-dollar startups—or “unicorns,” a term coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee—are, as their name indicates, relatively rare.

Soon, the demand surged so much that Levie, balancing sixteen-hour days with the company and a full load of college coursework, dropped out of school to become Box’s CEO. He was nineteen. There’s an enduring myth that most billion-dollar startups begin this way, by young people with the freedom to take big risks. It’s not just Levie—the legend of the tech wunderkind is etched into the public imagination. Mark Zuckerberg famously coded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room. Melanie Perkins was twenty-two when she pitched the idea of Canva, a graphic design platform valued at billions of dollars. Ritesh Agarwal was nineteen when he started Oyo Rooms, a global hotel chain valued at multiple billions of dollars. And Patrick and John Collison, the brothers who co-founded Stripe, were each billionaires before the age of thirty.

If their goal was to start a company so they could sell it and use the money to retire and have fun for the rest of their lives, they wouldn’t have started from zero to launch a new idea and a new company—again and again and again. Even for those who aren’t Super Founders, individuals who start billion-dollar companies tend to have a compulsion to build stuff. Take Mark Zuckerberg. When he famously created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, he was a nineteen-year-old wunderkind with no real work experience. By that time, though, he’d already built three other projects: CourseMatch, which helped Harvard students choose classes; FaceMash, an app that ranked Harvard students by attractiveness; and Synapse Music Player.


pages: 359 words: 110,488

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bioinformatics, corporate governance, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Google Chrome, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, obamacare, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Wayback Machine

Lorraine drove over from McLean on several occasions and accompanied Noel, clad in her jogging suit, on walks through the neighborhood. One day, Noel came over to the Fuisz home for lunch. Richard joined them out on the house’s big stone patio and the conversation drifted to Elizabeth. She had just been profiled in Inc. magazine alongside several other young entrepreneurs, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. The press her daughter was beginning to garner was a source of great pride to Noel. As they nibbled on a meal Lorraine had picked up from a McLean gourmet shop, Fuisz suggested to Noel in a syrupy singsong voice he employed when he turned on the charm that he could be of assistance to Elizabeth.

While the rest of the country licked its wounds from the devastating financial crisis, a new technology boom was getting under way, fueled by several factors. One of them was the wild success of Facebook. In June 2010, the social network’s private valuation rose to $23 billion. Six months later, it jumped to $50 billion. Every startup founder in the Valley wanted to be the next Mark Zuckerberg and every VC wanted a seat on the next rocket ship to riches. The emergence of Twitter, which was valued at more than $1 billion in late 2009, added to the excitement. Meanwhile, the iPhone and competing smartphones featuring Google’s Android operating system were beginning to usher in a shift to mobile computing, as cellular networks became faster and capable of handling larger amounts of data.

Those sounded like the words of a high school chemistry student, not a sophisticated laboratory scientist. The New Yorker writer had called the description “comically vague.” When I stopped to think about it, I found it hard to believe that a college dropout with just two semesters of chemical engineering courses under her belt had pioneered cutting-edge new science. Sure, Mark Zuckerberg had learned to code on his father’s computer when he was ten, but medicine was different: it wasn’t something you could teach yourself in the basement of your house. You needed years of formal training and decades of research to add value. There was a reason many Nobel laureates in medicine were in their sixties when their achievements were recognized.


pages: 388 words: 111,099

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

Our current policies on fact checking people in political office, or those running for office, are a threat to what Facebook stands for. We strongly object to this policy as it stands. It doesn’t protect voices, but instead allows politicians to weaponise our platform by targeting people who believe that content posted by political figures is trustworthy. Open letter from Facebook employees to CEO MARK ZUCKERBERG, October 2019 55 New Oxford Street is an unlikely setting for a raid by a squad of enforcement officials seeking to investigate election plundering. The office block looks like many in central London, nine storeys of glass and steel in muted greys and light blues. When a local estate agent was letting two of the floors in 2019, it listed the nearby underground stations as one of the biggest selling points.

Many of its former staffers founded Blue State Digital, a multi-million-dollar consultancy that worked on political campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the first politicians to recognise the full capabilities of digital social networks was a first-term senator from Illinois. In 2007, Chris Hughes – Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate – left Facebook to join Barack Obama’s nascent presidential campaign. The then 24-year-old, who has since become a vocal critic of the tech giant he helped build, set up My.BarackObama.com, or MyBo, which allowed supporters to become active campaign organisers. Around 2 million volunteers organised 200,000 events and raised $30 million in what was dubbed “the Facebook election”.23 Obama won 365 of the 538 Electoral College votes.

It had suspended political advertisements ahead of a referendum on abortion in Ireland in 2018 after evidence emerged of foreign, mainly American, ‘pro-life’ donors buying adverts targeted at Irish voters.§ Facebook was, he said, introducing a comprehensive library of all paid-for political advertising. Richard Allan was a flinty witness. I could only see the back of his white-haired head and his gesticulating hands. His answers were often short and testy. He said that Mark Zuckerberg – who had been invited – would like to have attended but couldn’t find the time. The politicians were not impressed. A green seat was left vacant with the Facebook founder’s name on it. One lawmaker complained that democracy had “been upended by frat boy billionaires from California”. A month earlier, the British Information Commissioner had issued Facebook with its maximum fine – half a million pounds – for failing to protect user data.66 Allan looked most uncomfortable when he was asked about his second job, as a life peer in the House of Lords.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Craig Silverman, “This Analysis Shows How Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook,” BuzzFeed, November 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook; Craig Silverman and Alexander Lawrence, “How Teens in the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters with Fake News,” BuzzFeed, November 3, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo; and Zeynep Tufekci, “Mark Zuckerberg Is in Denial,” New York Times, November 15, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/opinion/mark-zuckerberg-is-in-denial.html. 11. Silverman, “This Analysis.” 12. Sue Shellenbarger, “Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds,” Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/most-students-dont-know-when-news-is-fake-stanford-study-finds-1479752576; Craig Silverman and Jeremy Singer-Vine, “Most Americans Who See Fake News Believe It, New Survey Says,” BuzzFeed, December 6, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/fake-news-survey. 13.

Facebook’s policy on real names is not an accident. Trying to force or nudge people to use their “real names” is part of the articulated ideology of Facebook and is central to its business model. The rule is also part of the expressed ideology of its founder (who still controls the platform), Mark Zuckerberg. In reference to pseudonym use, Zuckerberg once said, “Having two identities for yourself is an example of lack of integrity”—a statement ignoring the obvious function of social roles: people live in multiple contexts and they do not behave the same way in each of them.20 A student is not the same way at home, in class, or at a party.

Even though Michael Anti is what his Chinese friends call him and is his byline in the New York Times, the name is a pen name. Anti never uses his legal name, Zhao Jing, which is completely unknown to his circle of friends and colleagues, let alone his readers. Anti angrily decried the contrast between his treatment and that of Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg’s puppy, named Beast, which is allowed its own page. Because of Facebook’s real-name policy, to this day, Anti does not have a Facebook page. Even in developed nations where people are not necessarily hiding from the authorities, Facebook’s policies cause problems for social movements. LGBTQ people have been some of the sharpest and most vocal critics of Facebook’s real-name policies.


pages: 128 words: 38,187

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Women who channel their energies toward reaching the top of corporate America undermine the struggles of women trying to realize institutional change by organizing unions and implementing laws that protect women (and men) in the workplace. An anecdote shared by Sandberg illustrates this point: In 2010 Mark Zuckerberg pledged $100 million to improve the performance metrics of the Newark Public Schools. The money would be distributed through a new foundation called Startup: Education. Sandberg recommended Jen Holleran, a woman she knew “with deep knowledge and experience in school reform” to run the foundation.

It’s not just Bill and Medinda Gates. Education reformers lobby Congress to pass legislation written by the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative legislators and business groups that writes sample legislation for political representatives to present to Congress and state legislatures. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to donate $100 million to “fix” the Newark Public School System, the foundation board established to decide how to use the money had only a single community member on it—(former) Mayor Cory Booker.48 Foundations are not only unaccountable and undemocratic—they often also implement programs and structures that are undemocratic.

Altieri, and Peter Rosset, “Ten Reasons Why the Rockefeller and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations’ Alliance for Another Green Revolution Will Not Solve the Problems of Poverty and Hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Food First Policy Brief No. 12, San Francisco: Food First, 2006. 39For a good discussion of the Green Revolution and its problems, see McMichael, Development and Social Change. 40Holt-Giménez, Altieri, and Rosset, “Ten Reasons.” 41“Giving with One Hand and Taking with Two: A Critique of AGRA’s African Agricultural Status Report 2013,” Johannesburg: African Centre for Biosafety, 2013, www.acbio.org.za/images/stories/dmdocuments/AGRA-report-Nov2013.pdf. 42See AGRA Watch, www.seattleglobaljustice.org/agra-watch/about-us/. 43African Centre for Biosafety, “Giving with One Hand,” p. 18. 44Robert Rothstein, March 8, 2011, www.epi.org/publication/fact-challenged_policy/. 45Dana Goldstein, “Grading ‘Waiting for Superman,’” Nation, October 11, 2010. 46Ravitch, Reign of Error, p. 33. 47William J. Bushaw, “The Seven Most Surprising Findings of the 2012 PDK/Gallup Poll on Public Schools,” Education Week blog, August 23, 2012. 48Maggie Severns, “Whatever Happened to the $100 Million Mark Zuckerberg Gave to Newark Schools?” Mother Jones, March 28, 2013. 49Robert Reich, “A Failure of Philanthropy,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2005. 5 Looking Forward Capitalism both creates and destroys, and the past three decades have been no exception. Unprecedented generation of wealth, global integration, and technological innovation have been accompanied by a stratospheric rise in inequality, ever-expanding environmental destruction, and a loss of faith in capitalism as the best possible system.


pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Some of that is overheated, but there were consequences to their approaches that even Uber and Airbnb did not anticipate. At the center of this maelstrom are the young, wealthy, charismatic chief executives: Travis Kalanick and Brian Chesky. They represent a new kind of technology CEO, nothing at all like Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg, the awkward, introverted innovators who typified the previous generation of tech leaders. Instead, they are extroverted storytellers, capable of positioning their companies in the context of dramatic progress for humanity and recruiting not only armies of engineers but drivers, hosts, lobbyists, and lawmakers to their cause.

But Tiendung Le, who now lives in Melbourne, remembers Chesky as distracted and jittery that week, often standing on the balcony and staring wistfully toward downtown, as if all the action were there and he was far from it. “He was not very much present in the place, in the sense that he seemed to be thinking about something else,” Tiendung Le told me. On the second morning of his stay, Chesky planned to hear Mark Zuckerberg speak at the conference, and Tiendung Le gave him a ride. On the way they talked about the young and successful Zuckerberg, who was rocketing to fame. Chesky bristled with excitement at the opportunity to hear him speak. (The talk, with blogger Sarah Lacy, was considered something of a famous bust when attendees started Tweeting angrily that the conversation lacked substance.)

But it was too late. Chesky bombed, and Floodgate passed on the deal. All these investors had concerns about the size of the market, about the absence of any real users, and about the founders themselves, who didn’t resemble the wonky innovators who’d created great Silicon Valley companies, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. Design students seemed risky; Stanford computer science dropouts were considered a much better bet. And, frankly, the idea itself seemed small. “We made the classic mistake that all investors make,” wrote Fred Wilson, a Twitter backer, a few years later. “We focused too much on what they were doing at the time and not enough on what they could do, would do, and did do.”11 The year 2008 was also an anxious time in Silicon Valley.


pages: 304 words: 93,494

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

He turned around to make sure no one was within earshot. Then he opened the address book on his phone, scrolled down past the people’s names that began with the letter J, then past K, then L, and finally arrived at the number he was looking for: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. He peered over his shoulder again as Crystal and Ev and others stood talking by the kitchen, then looked back at his phone as he pressed the phone number next to Mark Zuckerberg’s name. IV. #EV The Third Twitter Leader Jack sat glaring at Ev, not a word coming out of his mouth, his eyes so steady and precise you’d have thought he was in the middle of a staring contest.

Or when Biz and Ev went to Al Gore’s apartment at the St. Regis for dinner and got “shit-faced drunk” as the former vice president of the United States tried to convince them to sell him part of Twitter. Or other bizarre acquisition attempts by Ashton Kutcher at his pool in Los Angeles and by Mark Zuckerberg at awkward meetings at his sparsely furnished house. Or when Kanye West, will.i.am, Lady Gaga, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John McCain, and countless other celebrities and politicians had arrived, sometimes unannounced, at the office, rapping, singing, preaching, tweeting (some others were even high or drunk), trying to understand how this bizarre thing that was changing society could be controlled and how they could own a piece of it.

When Ev stepped up to take charge of the company, he took a completely different approach to management, always trusting employees from the get-go, which gave them a sense of pride and, in turn, a loyalty to Ev and Twitter. Jack’s stare was interrupted when the following words came out of Ev’s mouth: “Mark Zuckerberg” and “Facebook.” In the weeks leading up to Jack’s firing, Facebook had been trying to buy Twitter. Mark had made it his personal mission to woo Jack into selling the little blue bird to Facebook. After Jack was let go, it was the two other Twitter cofounders who now needed romancing. Biz and Ev had driven down to Facebook’s campus a few days earlier to meet with Mark.


pages: 321 words: 92,828

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

In technology, whiz kid Palmer Luckey, the twenty-year-old founder of Oculus VR (acquired by Facebook for $2 billion), became a face of virtual reality, while fourteen-year-old Robert Nay cleared over $2 million in just two weeks with his mobile game Bubble Ball. At twenty-six, Evan Spiegel was worth $5.4 billion when Snapchat issued public stock in 2017. But Spiegel has miles to go to catch up with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, now an elder statesman at thirty-four, who with $60 billion is one of the five richest people in the world. Even in the stodgy world of chess, Norwegian Magnus Carlsen was a three-time world champion by twenty-five. This after earning the title of grandmaster at thirteen; at twenty-one, he’d become the youngest person ever to be ranked number one, and at twenty-three, he was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” by Time magazine.

Record-setting American astronaut Scott Kelly, a late bloomer himself, was even less of a standout. “I spent most days looking out the classroom window,” he told me. “You could have held a gun to my head, and it wouldn’t have made a difference.” Kelly’s brain wasn’t ready to bloom. Many of us see more of ourselves in Scott Kelly than in Mark Zuckerberg. We too have stories of fumbling starts, confusion, career or educational gaps, bad habits, bad luck, or lack of confidence. For the fortunate majority of us, however, some kind of intellectual or spiritual awakening happened, and we stepped onto a new, improved road. We found our way. But others become so steeped in shame or see themselves as so far removed from opportunity that they never develop their ability to bloom.

* * * In pursuit of early blooming—to get the highest possible test scores and GPAs, be admitted to the best college, and enter the right career track—we give young adults precious little time to be kids. And the perception that young people are “just smarter,” as once declared by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (when he was twenty-two), implies they should be successful more quickly. But often they’re not. For every Zuckerberg, who made his first billion by twenty-three, or Lena Dunham, the twenty-five-year-old creator of the HBO show Girls, there are tens of thousands of twenty-somethings sitting in their parents’ basements wondering why they performed poorly in school and haven’t yet made a movie, disrupted an industry, or started a fashion line.


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

., 94. 18 Lily Zheng, “We’re Entering the Age of Corporate Social Justice,” Harvard Business Review, June 15, 2020, https://hbr.org/2020/06/were-entering-the-age-of-corporate-social-justice (April 22, 2021). 19 Dan McLaughlin, “The Party in Power Is Directing a Corporate Conspiracy against Its Political Opposition,” National Review, April 13, 2021, https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/the-party-in-power-is-directing-a-corporate-conspiracy-against-its-political-opposition/ (April 22, 2021). 20 Zachary Evans, “Amazon, Google Join Hundreds of American Corporations in Signing Letter Opposing Voting Limits,” National Review, April 14, 2021, https://www.nationalreview.com/news/amazon-google-join-hundreds-of-american-corporations-in-signing-letter-opposing-voting-limits/ (April 22, 2021). 21 Phill Kline, “How Mark Zuckerberg’s $350 million threatens democracy,” Washington Examiner, October 21, 2020, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-mark-zuckerbergs-dollar350-million-threatens-democracy/ar-BB1afARG (April 22, 2021); J. Christian Adams, “The Real Kraken: What Really Happened to Donald Trump in the 2020 Election,” PJ Media, December 2, 2020, https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2020/12/02/the-real-kraken-what-really-happened-to-donald-trump-in-the-2020-election-n1185494 (April 22, 2021). 22 Mark R.

YouTube removes video featuring man who reversed his transgender surgery 9. YouTube suspends and demonetizes conservative news network One America News (OAN) 10. Instagram bans ads for Senator Marsha Blackburn’s children’s book On January 31, 2021, Project Veritas released a video it received from a Facebook insider where CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other top executives discussed the company’s “wide-ranging powers to censor political speech and promote partisan objectives.”68 In the January 7 video, Zuckerberg is seen accusing then-President Trump of subverting the republic. “It’s so important that our political leaders lead by example, make sure we put the nation first here, and what we’ve seen is that the president [Trump] has been doing the opposite of that….

A hard lesson has been learned, particularly in the last year, that Big Tech is, in fact, an oligopoly of its own, in which a few billionaires censor, suspend, ban, and edit the postings, videos, and comments that offend or challenge the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party, the various Marxist movements, the coronavirus pandemic authoritarians, etc. Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg even contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in grants during the last election to increase turnout in Democratic Party strongholds in key battleground states.21 What can be done about these assaults on our liberty, families, and country? Of course, I do not have all the answers. To begin with, I warned years ago, in Liberty and Tyranny, that we “must become more engaged in public matters….


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

Futurists and “digital prophets,” like the elfin Australian David “Shingy” Shing, with his Vegas fountain of wild hair and Elton John glasses, were paid handsomely to interpret the transformative impact of the latest digital buzzword—big data, wearable, drone, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI)—and how it would change everything from the world’s economic order to pizza delivery. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg were widely regarded as oracles of digitization, and we paid careful attention to their latest projections about the future it would form. The promise of the digital future constantly shaped our culture. From books and stories to TV shows and blockbuster movies, we sat and watched this future projected with awe: the holodeck, transporters, and touchscreen interface of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the hoverboards and giant TV screens of Back to the Future II, the dystopian predictions of Maximum Overdrive, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Lawnmower Man, and, my personal favorite, Demolition Man, where a cryogenically frozen supercop (played by Sylvester Stallone) is thawed out in the future to hunt down his thawed supervillain nemesis (played by Wesley Snipes) in a digital utopia where commercial jingles dominate popular music and toilets automatically clean your bum with three magical seashells.

SAP had miraculously created a VR experience that was more boring than an actual business meeting. Don’t worry though, Facebook is here to fix this. “Five years from now people are going to be able to live where they want and work from wherever they want—but are going to be able to feel present as if they’re together when they’re doing that,” Mark Zuckerberg said when unveiling the company’s new Horizon Workrooms platform for VR meetings in the summer of 2021. Horizon Workrooms put a fun, fresh spin on the remote meeting, with VR-enabled cartoon avatars featuring dynamic arm movements and facial expressions—a spin so fresh and fun that Business Insider condemned it as a “loathsome worker-surveillance dystopia” designed to accelerate the growing trend of corporations spying on every keystroke their employees make.

“There’s a naive faith in democracy that the more participation you permit, the more barriers you tear down, it will lead to a spontaneous order, but there’s so many examples where increased access and transparency made the world worse.” And yet transparency was the core value of social media companies and their godlike founding fathers, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, who wrapped themselves in the flag of free speech and open access whenever the consequences of their creations led to offline chaos, violence, and social erosion. “I think transparency is overrated in too many respects,” Fukuyama said, noting that a completely open conversation, without social norms, rules, or the constraints of a civilized society, is ultimately counterproductive to a healthy democratic process.


pages: 253 words: 65,834

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms by Jeffrey Bussgang

business cycle, business process, carried interest, deal flow, digital map, discounted cash flows, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pets.com, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds

Many VCs prefer young founders who are incredibly brilliant and gifted even though they are inexperienced and naïve. Look at the case studies of the successful start-ups begun by college dropouts, such as Microsoft (Bill Gates), Dell (Michael Dell), and Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg). Fred Wilson’s observation on Facebook is that the singular focus of the young entrepreneur is very powerful. “You have this twenty-five-year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who doesn’t have a wife, he doesn’t have kids, he doesn’t have anything in his life that’s distracting him from what he’s trying to do. And there’s nobody saying to him, ‘God damn it, take the money off the table.

I was also fortunate enough to be able to convince some of today’s most successful entrepreneurs—including the founders of Constant Contact, LinkedIn, Sirtris, Twitter, Zynga, and others—to talk from their deep knowledge and experience about how to work with VCs to shape a young company and help it grow. The purpose of this book is to share the magic formula of how great entrepreneurs team with VCs to create valuable companies from raw start-up. Whether you are the next Mark Zuckerberg (the Harvard student who started Facebook) or Jim Barksdale (the seasoned Fortune 500 executive who became CEO of Netscape), Mastering the VC Game will provide you with an insider’s guide to the world of VC-backed company formation, growth, and exit. In the book’s first two chapters, I will explore the psyche of the two protagonists in the start-up game: the entrepreneur and the VC.

Thus, imagine the fewer than one thousand senior VCs spending their time shuttling back and forth between Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York City, all tightly interconnected through their college and business school alumni networks, interlocking business and personal relationships, and all connected by no more than one degree of separation using social networking tools like Reid Hoffman’s LinkedIn, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, or Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. There are exceptions to every rule and this description is obviously a general characterization, but in short, that is the general essence of the astoundingly tightly woven VC club. As a member of this club, I am pleased to take you inside for a tour—with the help of several of its most successful and long-standing members.


pages: 279 words: 71,542

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cal Newport, data science, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, financial independence, game design, Hacker News, index fund, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Money Mustache, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, price discrimination, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

“we are in great haste”: Thoreau, Walden, 34. Alter decided to measure his own smartphone use: Alter, Irresistible, 13–14. “There are millions of smartphone users”: Alter, Irresistible, 14. “Facebook . . . was built”: “Facebook’s Letter from Mark Zuckerberg—Full Text,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/feb/01/facebook-letter-mark-zuckerberg-text The term constant is not hyperbole: “Tweens, Teens, and Screens: What Our New Research Uncovers,” Common Sense Media, November 2, 2015, https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/tweens-teens-and-screens-what-our-new-research-uncovers.

The key question, of course, is whether the spread of solitude deprivation should concern us. Tackled abstractly, the answer is not immediately obvious. The idea of being “alone” can seem unappealing, and we’ve been sold, over the past two decades, the idea that more connectivity is better than less. Surrounding the announcement of his company’s 2012 IPO, for example, Mark Zuckerberg triumphantly wrote: “Facebook . . . was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.” This obsession with connection is clearly overly optimistic, and it’s easy to make light of its grandiose ambition, but when solitude deprivation is put into the context of the ideas discussed earlier in this chapter, this prioritization of communication over reflection becomes a source of serious concern.

PRACTICE: DELETE SOCIAL MEDIA FROM YOUR PHONE Something big happened to Facebook starting around 2012. In March of that year, they began, for the first time, to show ads on the mobile version of their service. By October, 14 percent of the company’s ad revenue came from mobile ads, making it into a small but nicely profitable piece of Mark Zuckerberg’s growing empire. Then it took off. By the spring of 2014, Facebook reported that 62 percent of its revenue came from mobile, leading the technology website The Verge to declare: “Facebook is a mobile company now.” This statement has continued to prove accurate: by 2017, mobile ad revenue rose to 88 percent of their earnings, and is still climbing.


pages: 272 words: 64,626

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

Social networking is a powerful tool, especially for getting someone else to do work for you. Interviewing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg helped me finally make sense of the phenomenon. “What did you see that got this thing off the ground?” I asked. “There’s this weird effect,” he explained. “If you have a lot of people contributing information, a lot of times you can build a source or a set of information that’s just better than any individual can do.” I have T-shirts older than Mark Zuckerberg. At the time I met him Facebook probably had a mere 100 million users. He was twenty-two, confident but somewhat soft-spoken.

I met Rupert Murdoch in the early nineties when he almost lost News Corporation under a siege of debt, and when he began transforming the entire media space, from newspapers to TV to film. I met Mark Cuban when he and his partner Todd Wagner were peddling AudioNet to anyone in Silicon Valley who would listen, before they sold the audio and video streaming company to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion. I met Mark Zuckerberg just as Facebook was crossing a few million users; he talked about lowering the cost of communications between groups of people. Today, a good chunk of the planet logs in to the site regularly to keep in touch with friends and family. I can go on. Meg Whitman when she was at eBay, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, even a few telecom folks who were billionaires for a moment in time.

I wonder if in a hundred years, some wiseass is going to tour Google’s Larry Page’s Palo Alto home and point out to anyone who will listen that Page wasn’t really rich—what, no holodeck? You can bet on it. How Many? I WOULDN’T BE SO BOLD AS TO TELL YOU THAT YOUR IDEA OR your job or your investments have to go 12 for 12 (or 13 for 13) with my Rules for Free Radicals. But the more the better. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook has embraced ten of the Rules; I leave it to you to figure out the ones he has missed, so far anyway. Some Rules are easy. Jeez, if you can’t find something that scales, you’re clearly not looking hard enough. Finding things that are adaptive to humans—that could be a little harder.


pages: 224 words: 71,060

A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream by Yuval Levin

affirmative action, Airbnb, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, conceptual framework, David Brooks, demand response, Donald Trump, fake news, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, WeWork

I owe this distinction between substitute and supplement to Joshua Mitchell, who laid it out to me in conversation but has since articulated it most fully in his excellent essay “When Supplements Become Substitutes,” in the Autumn 2018 issue of City Journal. 2. Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10103508221158471/. (Throughout this chapter, and throughout the book, I treat “social media” as a singular rather than a plural term. This is in line with how the term is increasingly used and with recent dictionary usages, though I recognize there are arguments for attaching it to plural terms, since media is the plural of medium.) 3. Max Read, “Does Even Mark Zuckerberg Know What Facebook Is?,” New York Magazine, October 2, 2017. 4.

A lot of our time on these platforms is spent communicating in more traditional ways—exchanging information, keeping up with family and friends, learning something, being entertained. But what has been truly distinct about social media, and truly disruptive, has more to do with the tendency to substitute display and response for communication. That substitution points us to the peculiar idea of sociality that has shaped these platforms and been shaped by them. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, has been unusually articulate about this idea. He is careful always to describe Facebook users as a “community” and believes, as he put it in a 2017 manifesto for the company, that “Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community.” The role of the platform, in Zuckerberg’s vision, is fundamentally infrastructural.


pages: 232 words: 70,361

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

As we have seen, only 63% of national income is included in the base of the income tax—many forms of income are legally exempt. A significant portion of taxpayers benefit from these exemptions, but the truly wealthy benefit even more. For many of them, virtually all of their income is exempt. Think about it: what’s the true economic income of Mark Zuckerberg? He owns about 20% of Facebook, a company that made $20 billion in profits in 2018. So his income that year was 20% of 20 billion, $4 billion. However, Facebook did not pay any dividend, so none of these $4 billion were subject to individual income taxation. Like many other billionaires, Zuckerberg’s effective individual income tax rate is close to 0% today, and it will remain close to 0% for as long as he does not sell his stocks.

In that case, the wealthy cannot dodge taxes other than by reducing their true economic resources—that is, by choosing to become poorer. People rarely volunteer to become much poorer, even for such a noble cause as eschewing taxes. The changes in real behavior provoked by the tax code are generally quite limited. It’s unlikely that Steve Jobs would have invented another iMarvel if only his tax rate had been zero. Or that Mark Zuckerberg would have opted for a career in fine arts if the Internal Revenue Code had been penned differently. Yes, Apple does shift profits to Jersey, Facebook does create shell companies in the Cayman Islands, and a sprawling industry helps the wealthy slash their tax bills. But that’s tax avoidance, which flourishes in a light regulatory environment.

Raising other taxes, such as the estate tax, would not do either. We might take comfort in the idea that the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, will one day pay estate taxes on his immense wealth. But since the founder of Amazon turned fifty-five in 2019, that won’t (hopefully) happen before 2050. And let’s not mention Mark Zuckerberg, born in 1984—is it wise to wait until 2075 for him to contribute to the public coffers? The way to address this issue is by taxing wealth itself, today and not at some distant future date.17 A wealth tax will never replace the income tax; its goal is more limited: to ensure that the ultra-wealthy do not pay less than the rest of the population.


pages: 481 words: 120,693

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

“They make a lot of money and they work incredibly hard and the husbands never see their children,” Holly Peterson said of the financiers of the Upper East Side. Their lives are driven not by culture or seasons or family tradition, but by the requirements of the latest deal or the mood of the markets. When Mark Zuckerberg rebuffed Yuri Milner’s first approach, the Russian investor, who was already a multimillionaire, turned up at the Internet boy wonder’s office in Palo Alto the next day, a round-trip journey of twelve thousand miles. In November 2010, the number two and heir apparent of one of the top private equity firms told me he was about to make a similar journey.

Inspired and advised by the liberal Soros, Pete Peterson—himself a Republican and former Nixon cabinet member—has spent $1 billion of his Blackstone windfall on a foundation dedicated to bringing down America’s deficit and entitlement spending. Bill Gates, likewise, devotes most of his energy and intellect today to his foundation’s work on causes ranging from supporting charter schools to combating disease in Africa. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has yet to reach his thirtieth birthday, but last fall he donated $100 million to improving Newark’s public schools. Insurance and real estate magnate Eli Broad has become an influential funder of stem cell research and school reform; Jim Balsillie, a cofounder of BlackBerry creator RIM, has established his own international affairs think tank; the list goes on and on.

David Rubenstein, the billionaire cofounder of the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s biggest private equity firms, told me that when he visited America’s top business schools during their spring recruiting season in 2011, he discovered that everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. “When I graduated from college, you wanted to work for IBM or GE,” he told me.” Now when I talk to people graduating from business school, they want to start their own company. Everyone wants to be Mark Zuckerberg; no one wants to be a corporate CEO. They want to be entrepreneurs and make their own great wealth.” That quest starts earlier and earlier. Jones and Doriot were both nearly fifty when they started their businesses. Nowadays, would-be plutocrats want to be well on their way to their fortune by their thirtieth birthday.


User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

Renuka, women like her, and even others in Kenya and Indonesia all shared a greater lack. It wasn’t that the internet didn’t work. It was that all too often, no one understood what the internet was. In the West we like to believe that the technologies that have transformed our lives can do the same for others in different cultures. Consider the optimism of Mark Zuckerberg, who in August 2013 declared that he’d use some of his billions to provide internet access to the entire world, through a new initiative called Internet.org.2 By 2017, when you arrived at the organization’s website, you saw smiling people on snowy steppes, and Africans joyfully cradling smartphones.

The idea was wildly popular at Facebook, sparking debate over how to do it, different tweaks and permutations, different names. Pearlman had another spin. “Leah wondered, wouldn’t it be cool if you could give someone props,” Rosenstein told me as we sat talking in a quiet corner of the sprawling modern offices of his startup, Asana, cofounded with Mark Zuckerberg’s college buddy Dustin Moskovitz. “At first I thought it was silly.” But Rosenstein and Pearlman kept thinking. “We talked about it, and by the end we had zoomed out and asked, ‘What are our goals with Facebook?’ One of our goals was a world in which people lift each other up, where positivity is the path of least resistance.”2 At the time, the only place to say anything in response to a post was in the comments.

Instead, with the mere rudiments of Facebook’s data, they could target people based on their specific personalities: how a particular person reacted to messages of fear or hope or generosity or greed. For the first time in the history of user-friendly design, you could change a person’s experience based on not just assumptions about an individual, but actual knowledge. Mark Zuckerberg has always borrowed from the language of user-friendly design to communicate his ambitions, saying that Facebook made its users happier and more fulfilled by “bringing the world closer together.” And yet he created much more than that: a company that could understand users with a precision that couldn’t be dreamed of before.


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

It stands out because the board is always different, the rules are clear, and the game is played in under an hour. Yet the capacity for deploying strategy, by building alliances or using emotions to foster deception, is limitless. Settlers of Catan was the first big European crossover tabletop hit in America. It initially gained a foothold in colleges and the technology industry (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly a huge fan), but as its cult following turned mainstream, it woke the nation up to this new concept of play. “The rise of Eurogames parallels the rise of digital games, but Eurogames are insistently analog,” Adrienne Raphel wrote in the New Yorker, in a profile of Teuber. “They can be as complex as video games, but, because there’s no fixed narrative, groups of people play together over and over.”

While old industry giants such as General Motors and General Electric were pandering for bailouts, companies such as Twitter, which counted their staff in the dozens, were being valued at many billions of dollars. Why invest in a blue-chip company struggling to adapt, when a small investment in a tech startup could make you rich overnight? Today, it is the titans of technology—Tesla’s Elon Musk, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Uber’s Travis Kalanick—who are the new gods of capitalism. Their stories of rapid success are the subjects of best-selling biographies and Hollywood movies. Silicon Valley has supplanted Wall Street as the destination for the best and brightest. The Economist reported that in 2014, one fifth of American business school graduates went to work in technology.

Second, the high-tech world is fueled by education. Its businesses are created by highly educated individuals, often at universities, and many of the products and services it sells appeal to an educated population. Education has become the pet cause of digital’s business leaders. Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and the venture capitalist Jim Breyer are among the top supporters of education philanthropy, funding everything from university scholarships and research grants to experiments in school reform stretching from inner-city Newark to remote African villages. Underlying this is the belief that digital technology can transform education in the same way it transformed business, media, and communications.


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Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

When companies run suggestion boxes: Birgit Verworn, “Does Age Have an Impact on Having Ideas? An Analysis of the Quantity and Quality of Ideas Submitted to a Suggestion System,” Creativity and Innovation Management 18 (2009): 326–34. average founder is thirty-eight: Claire Cain Miller, “The Next Mark Zuckerberg Is Not Who You Might Think,” New York Times, July 2, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/upshot/the-next-mark-zuckerberg-is-not-who-you-might-think.html. writer E. M. Forster: Karl E. Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd ed. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979). conceptual innovators are sprinters: David Galenson, Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

I saw how success is not usually attained by being ahead of everyone else but by waiting patiently for the right time to act. And to my utter shock, I learned that procrastinating can be good. Anyone who has ever worked with me knows how much I hate leaving things to the last minute, how I always think that anything that can be done should be done right away. Mark Zuckerberg, along with many others, will be pleased if I can let go of the relentless pressure I feel to finish everything early—and, as Adam points out, it might just help me and my teams achieve better results. INFORMED OPTIMIST Every day, we all encounter things we love and things that need to change.

When asked to name their favorite books, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel each chose Lord of the Rings,, the epic tale of a hobbit’s adventures to destroy a dangerous ring of power. Sheryl Sandberg and Jeff Bezos both pointed to A Wrinkle in Time,, in which a young girl learns to bend the laws of physics and travel through time. Mark Zuckerberg was partial to Ender’s Game, where it’s up to a group of kids to save the planet from an alien attack. Jack Ma named his favorite childhood book as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, about a woodcutter who takes the initiative to change his own fate. It’s likely that they were all highly original children, which accounts for why they were drawn to these tales in the first place.


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The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late by Michael Ellsberg

affirmative action, Black Swan, Burning Man, corporate governance, creative destruction, do what you love, financial engineering, financial independence, follow your passion, future of work, hiring and firing, independent contractor, job automation, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, mega-rich, meta-analysis, new economy, Norman Mailer, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social intelligence, solopreneur, Steve Ballmer, survivorship bias, telemarketer, Tony Hsieh

It looked like a good business opportunity, but there were plenty of other players, and it seemed plenty likely that they could beat us. And we were also thinking, Google could just jump in at any moment. They easily could have won in 2004. Now, of course, it’s a different story.” Dustin and his college buddies, roommates and fellow cofounders Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes, famously decided to move out to Palo Alto that summer, 2004, with the intention of going back to Harvard in the fall. “But by the time the end of June rolled around, it was more like a hundred and fifty thousand users, and we thought, ‘OK, this is actually pretty difficult to do, even without having sixty or eighty hours a week of classes, homework and paid work.

If your happiness depends on your draft pick or a single audition, that’s giving way too much power to someone else.” Learn the business side of your craft, and you’ll come away with applicable, marketable skills no matter what. For Dustin, of course, going for his dreams paid off. For several years, Mark Zuckerberg was the world’s youngest-ever self-made billionaire. But Dustin is eight days younger than Zuckerberg. When Facebook’s valuation soared in 2010, Dustin’s chunk surged to over two billion, and he took Zuckerberg’s place as the world’s youngest. Dustin has already started his next venture, Asana (http://asana.com), which aims to revolutionize workplace collaboration as thoroughly as Facebook has revolutionized the way we socialize.

Bisnow and his team of merry twentysomethings had arrived at the central halls of global power. Now, Elliott rolls with Bill Clinton, Mark Cuban, and fellow non-college-graduates Ted Turner, Sean Parker, Russell Simmons, and Twitter cofounder Evan Williams, all of whom have participated at Summit Series gatherings. Aside from Facebook cofounder (and college dropout) Mark Zuckerberg, Elliott is now quite possibly one of the most well-connected twentysomethings on the planet. As a Forbes profile of Summit asks, “Do you know of a more influential networking event for a new generation of geniuses? If so, let me know.”2 Elliott has left the family newsletter business in good hands and is focusing entirely on Summit.


pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

But algorithms are programmed by people, and people are imperfect and have biases. The left may be happy that conservatives are censored today, but who will control these platforms in 5 to 10 years? And who will prevent these giants from cooperating with countries that censor their own citizens? Outright censorship is not so outlandish. According to the New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg has been learning Chinese. More important, the social network has quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people's news feeds in specific geographic areas. “The feature was created to help Facebook get into China, a market where the social network has been blocked.”16 Mr.

At first, they encouraged readers to post links that led back to their own news websites.37 Facebook was getting so much traffic that they convinced publishers to post Instant Articles directly on Facebook so load times would be faster and the content would be tailored to Facebook's audience. Gradually, Facebook started exerting more and more control over what was being seen, to the point that they became the main publishers of everyone's content. Mark Zuckerberg says his site is a “community,” but the site is not a co-op. Facebook decides what gets views and what doesn't and captures all the profit. As Facebook's News Feed became an incessant barrage of children's baseball games, cat memes, pratfall videos, and news articles, Facebook started restricting what content would actually make it onto people's feed.

Today, over 70% of traffic is dominated by the two sources.46 For websites like the comedy hub Funny or Die, Facebook ended up capturing all the economics of their content. In the end, Funny or Die eliminated its entire editorial team following a trend of comedy websites scaling back. When Funny or Die fired most of its staff, employee Matt Klinman posted on Twitter, “Mark Zuckerberg just walked into Funny or Die and laid off all my friends.” He explained: “There is simply no money in making comedy online anymore. Facebook has completely destroyed independent digital comedy and we need to fucking talk about it.”47 Today, there's no reason to go to a comedy website that has a video if that same video is right on Facebook.


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The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Palm Treo, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

Gates—the world’s second richest man—told Fortune that 50 percent of one’s wealth is a “low bar” for giving, while Buffett—not far behind—has pledged to give away 99 percent of his wealth.6 Buffett has been a major donor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has pursued such lofty goals as eradicating global poverty and disease and empowering women to transform their lives. You can do that when wealth is abundant. The Gates Foundation employs 1,376 persons in its efforts to make the world a better place with an endowment of some $39 billion.7 And in time, the Gates Foundation will be dwarfed by other, bigger foundations. Indeed, in December 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, pledged to give away 99 percent of their Facebook stock to charity. Chan Zuckerberg Science, an offshoot of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, LLC, already has $3 billion behind it and employs, the Wall Street Journal reports, “dozens of top scientists who think it is possible to cure, prevent or manage diseases by the end of the century.”8 It’s not crazy to speculate that Zuckerberg’s grandchildren might be born into a world no longer ravaged by cancer thanks to the generosity of their grandparents.

While a net worth of $75 million got you into the Forbes 400 in 1982, the price of entry was $1.5 billion by 2014.10 With the exception of a few mild recessions and the big one in 2008, the U.S. economy has grown fairly rapidly since 1982, and the ranks of the richest have changed constantly. Mark Zuckerberg was a high school student in 2000, but by 2015 he was pledging to give away tens of billions. If the U.S. and world economies continue to grow, the richest people in the world in 2046 will be a very different crowd from those of today. And the wealth in the hands of the superrich thirty years from now promises to be mind-boggling.

Brooks, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism (New York: Basic Books, 2006), xii. 2.Nikhil Deogun, “The Legacy: Roberto Goizueta Led Coca-Cola Stock Surge, and Its Home Prospers,” Wall Street Journal, October 20, 1997. 3.Ibid. 4.Ibid. 5.Ibid. 6.John Tamny, “If Charity Is Their Goal, Gates and Buffett Should Hoard Their Wealth,” Forbes.com, June 17, 2010. 7.Source: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Fact Sheet, http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Information/Foundation-Factsheet. 8.Deepa Seetharaman, “Zuckerberg Fund to Invest $3 Billion,” Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2016. 9.Sarah Frier, “Mark Zuckerberg Philanthropy Pledge Sets New Giving Standard,” Bloomberg, December 1, 2015. 10.Robert Arnott, William Bernstein, and Lillian Wu, “The Myth of Dynastic Wealth: The Rich Get Poorer,” Cato Journal, Vol. 35 (Fall 2015): 461–463. 11.Arthur C. Brooks, Who Really Cares, 3. 12.Ibid., 13.Ibid., 7. 14.Ibid., 77. 15.Ibid., 78. 16.Ibid., 124. 17.Blair Tindall, Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005),149. 18.Ibid., 50. 19.Ibid., 50. 20.Ibid., 53–54. 21.Ibid., 154. 22.Ibid., 208. 23.Ibid., 22. 24.Ibid., 86. 25.Ibid., 97. 26.Ibid., 209. 27.Ibid., 304. 28.Monte Burke, “College Coaches Deserve Their Pay,” Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2015. 29.Ibid. 30.Ibid. 31.Ibid. 32.Brooks, Who Really Cares, 119. 33.Brooks, Who Really Cares, 139. 34.Rebecca R.


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Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The project was the brainchild of Code.org, a nonprofit group that shares some of the same goals as the Scratch Foundation. By week’s end some twenty million people had written six hundred million lines of code, the organizers announced. Code.org boasts deep pockets and a glamorous cast of funders, including Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. Not everyone has been impressed. Shortly after the group launched in February 2013, Dave Winer, a longtime computer industry gadfly and the author of the blog Scripting News, wrote that “you should [code] because you love it, because it’s fun—because it’s wonderful to create machines with your mind.

That night I collected data that demonstrated all the core principles we would publish a year later in Nature Neuroscience, announcing that ChR2 could be used to depolarize neurons.”9 This was a significant breakthrough—and in 2015 it would be recognized as exactly that when Deisseroth and Boyden received $3 million each as part of the Breakthrough Prize awards organized by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech-industry philanthropists.10 Previously neuroscientists were simply spectators at brain events, watching vast swaths of neurons react to this or that stimulus, and attempting to infer causality. But with “optogenetics,” as Deisseroth and another colleague called the new technique, researchers could stimulate individual neural circuits and observe how they behaved.

All of a sudden it has learned to play really good Go, very quickly. But it doesn’t have a lot of experience. What we saw in chess and checkers is that experience counts for a lot.”7 Not everyone has cheered on the machine’s inexorable invasion of all aspects of our lives. On the day the Nature article was published, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post announcing that Facebook had its own AI capable of beating humans at Go. “Why don’t you leave that ancient game alone and let it be without any artificial players? Do we really need an AI in everything?”8 By June the comment had received more than eighty-five thousand reactions and four thousand comments.


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Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

For those children born in 1964 and after, digits would replace rivets in their engineering dreams. Apple’s Steve Jobs was only nine years old at the time of the New York World’s Fair. Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, would not be born for close to another decade; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for another ten years after that. As it turned out, the most forward-looking section of Flushing Meadows Corona Park turned out to be the exhibit belonging to International Business Machines Corporation, better known as IBM. IBM’s mission for the 1964 World’s Fair was to cement computers (and more specifically Artificial Intelligence) in the public consciousness, alongside better-known wonders like space rockets and nuclear reactors.

‘Tay is now offline and we’ll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values,’ wrote Microsoft’s head of research in a formal apology to everyone hurt by the AI’s ‘offensive and hurtful tweets’. But despite these deeply embarrassing mishaps, it doesn’t mean that chatbots can’t be useful. The Rise of Virtual Assistants A few months earlier, in January 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his latest New Year’s resolution. As the co-founder of the world’s biggest social network and with a personal net worth estimated at $46 billion, Zuckerberg had already achieved more than most of us could hope to in multiple lifetimes. However that hadn’t stopped the youthful innovator from setting himself one New Year’s resolution each year in order to, as he puts it, ‘learn new things and grow outside my work at Facebook’.

The Difference between Narrow and Wide A lifetime of sci-fi movies and books have ingrained in us the expectation that there will be some Singularity-style ‘tipping point’ at which Artificial General Intelligence will take place. Devices will get gradually smarter and smarter until, somewhere in a secret research lab deep in Silicon Valley, a message pops up on Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin’s computer monitor, saying that AGI has been achieved. Like Ernest Hemingway once wrote about bankruptcy, Artificial General Intelligence will take place ‘gradually, then suddenly’. This is the narrative played out in films like James Cameron’s seminal Terminator 2: Judgment Day.


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Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It. by Mitch Joel

3D printing, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, behavioural economics, call centre, clockwatching, cloud computing, content marketing, digital nomad, do what you love, Firefox, future of work, gamification, ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, place-making, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, vertical integration, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

EVERYBODY IS BETTING ON MOBILE (JUST ASK GOOGLE, FACEBOOK, AND TWITTER). We’re all experts until something happens like Facebook buying Instagram for $1 billion. Facebook made it hard (very, very hard) to look past the billion dollars, but the deal was a testament to the one-screen world. It’s no secret that Facebook struggles to win on the mobile platforms. Mark Zuckerberg curated a hacker culture on a Web-based platform in building up Facebook to what it has become. On top of that, Facebook’s Achilles’ heel is photos. People post, share, comment, and look at photos nonstop on Facebook (admit it, just today you were probably creeping on someone from high school that you swore you would never speak to again).

Squiggly means that you can’t hide behind small thinking and quarterly employee reviews. This means that we can’t be afraid to have a more squiggly career path, and we also have to be more open to doing the big, big stuff (Steve Jobs would often talk about making a “dent in the universe”). You will hear Mark Zuckerberg talk about Facebook as the place to connect the world. Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google often talk about Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and knowledge (and, with that, they squiggle to create self-driving cars!). It’s one thing to dream big. It’s another thing to think and do big.

In March 2012, I had the pleasure of delivering the opening keynote address at the Art of Marketing event in Toronto. With more than fifteen hundred business professionals in attendance, I shared the stage with people like Martin Lindstrom (author of Brandwashed and Buyology), Randi Zuckerberg (former head of marketing at Facebook and sister of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg), Scooter Braun (music industry professional and the person who discovered and manages Justin Bieber), and many others. The daylong, fully sold-out event featured seven top-of-their-game speakers and marketing professionals, but one individual stole the show. Eric Ryan is the co-founder (with his business partner, Adam Lowry) and chief brand architect of Method.


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How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, Russell Brand, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, Yogi Berra

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 35. 49David Edgerton, Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (London: Profile, 2006). 50Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Richard Tuck, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 9. 51Mark Zuckerberg, ‘Building global community’, Facebook, 16 February 2017, http://bit.ly/2m39az5 52Dave Eggers, The Circle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). 53Mark Zuckerberg, ‘Mark Zuckerberg’, Facebook, 3 January 2017, http://bit.ly/2hXwZIi 54Josh Glancy, ‘Mark Zuckerberg’s “Listening Tour”’, Sunday Times, 23 July 2017, http://bit.ly/2hvF4gm 55Eggers, The Circle, p. 386. 56The fullest account of this story is in Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015). 57Ezra Klein & Alvin Chang, ‘“Political identity is fair game for hatred”: how Republicans and Democrats discriminate’, Vox, 7 December 2015, http://bit.ly/2ja3CQb 58‘Mark Lilla vs identity politics’, The American Conservative, 16 August 2017, http://bit.ly/2uTZYhy 59‘5th Republican debate transcript’, Washington Post, 15 December 2015, http://wapo.st/2mTDrBY 60Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942). 61Joe McGinnis, The Selling of the President 1968 (New York: Trident Press, 1969). 62Robert A.

They are not used to being loathed. The state is not sure how to deal with monsters like these. Still, they are just corporations. If American democracy found the strength to face down corporate titans like Standard Oil at the start of the twentieth century, why shouldn’t it take on Google and Facebook today? Mark Zuckerberg is mind-bogglingly wealthy. But John D. Rockefeller was on some measures the richest man who has ever lived. That wasn’t enough to save his corporate creation. All corporations have an off switch. The state knows where to find it. Or at least it used to. No corporation, however rich or powerful, can exist without the support of the state.

These cult leaders of the new solutionism, along with their many devotees, have nothing against democracy because they are sure that anything which enhances our problem-solving ability is a democratic plus. At the same time, they remain confident that their technology is able to supply democratic recognition across the board: it is giving voice to the voiceless. What they cannot tell us is how these two things go together. Because they don’t. This makes Mark Zuckerberg a bigger threat to American democracy than Donald Trump. Zuckerberg has no evil designs on democratic institutions; indeed, he seems to have very little gripe with democracy at all. His intentions are good. That is the threat he poses. The central challenge democracy faces is to find a way to reconnect what has come apart, which means first of all seeing that simply pushing harder at the two sides of democratic life without connecting them will do no good.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

The top ten apps people kept on their smartphones in 2017 were the following: 1. Facebook 2. Gmail 3. Google Maps 4. Amazon 5. Facebook Messenger 6. YouTube 7. Google Search 8. Google Play Store 9. Instagram 10. Apple App Store Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Brin, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos—these are the titans of today. Facebook is social media. Google is search. Amazon is e-commerce. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, is worth $112 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, is worth $69 billion. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, more than $50 billion each. But these men’s titanic profiles are based on more than their wealth.

The Center for Responsive Politics reports that in 2016, the internet and electronics industry together spent a record $178.5 million on federal lobbying, putting them right behind the pharmaceutical industry and twice Wall Street financial firms’ spending.56 Continuing the revolving-door tradition between Washington and the internet industry, Facebook hired for highranking positions Chris Herndon, former counsel on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee; Caitlin O’Neill, Nancy Pelosi’s former chief of staff; and Jodi Seth, John Kerry’s communications director. Tech titans are also testing other strategies to ward off growing criticism. Mark Zuckerberg went on a “listening tour” of the United States beginning in January 2017. In the months after the presidential election, as public disapproval grew over the company’s role in allowing fake news to possibly impact the election results, Zuckerberg declared that he needed to get out to the people.

To get to the future, Silicon Valley thought leaders believe society needs to remain free from the suffocating grasp of the government. Ellen Ullman sees this Ayn Randian sensibility expressed often in the Valley by men who see the government as “anathema, a pit, the muck in which dreams of changing the world will forever sink.”23 In his early days at the helm of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg listed himself as “enemy of the state.” Katherine Losse, in her memoir about working at Facebook, recalls an encounter with Zuckerberg in which he asked her to write a series of blog posts about “the way the world was going.” He wanted one post to discuss the theme of “companies over countries.”


pages: 511 words: 132,682

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

NM AG Complaint ¶ 118. But Google did add, “We really appreciate the research that your organization has been looking into, to make the internet a more safe space for everyone.” 41.Roger McNamee, “I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg. I Loved Facebook. But I Can’t Stay Silent about What’s Happening,” Time, January 17, 2019, https://time.com/5505441. 42.McNamee, “I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg.” 43.McNamee, “I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg” (“Every action a user took gave Facebook a better understanding of that user—and of that user’s friends—enabling the company to make tiny ‘improvements’ in the user experience every day, which is to say it got better at manipulating the attention of users”); Roger McNamee, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 9, 62–63, 98–101. 44.McNamee, Zucked, 103. 45.Chang Liu and Jianling Ma, “Social Support Through Online Social Networking Sites and Addiction among College Students: The Mediating Roles of Fear of Missing Out and Problematic Smartphone Use,” Current Psychology (2018), https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-0075-5. 46.Zephoria Digital Marketing, “The Top 20 Valuable Facebook Statistics—Updated April 2019,” accessed April 30, 2019, https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/. 47.Todd Clarke, “22+ Instagram Stats That Marketers Can’t Ignore This Year,” Hootsuite Blog, March 5, 2019, https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-statistics/. 48.Rani Molla and Kurt Wagner, “People Spend Almost as Much Time on Instagram as They Do on Facebook,” Recode, June 25, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/6/25/17501224/instagram-facebook-snapchat-time-spent-growth-data (data for Android users). 49.Facebook Inc., Third Quarter 2018 Results Conference Call (October 30, 2018), https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2018/Q3/Q318-earnings-call-transcript.pdf. 50.Rayna Sariyska et al., “The Motivation for Facebook Use—Is It a Matter of Bonding or Control over Others?

Children are specifically targeted as part of this goal.”39 Moreover, by representing that Tiny Lab’s apps were “suitable and safe for children, complying with all applicable privacy laws,”40 Google is alleged to have engaged in “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” in violation of New Mexico’s laws and to the detriment of consumers. Google’s efforts to addict us and our children are surely matched in their effectiveness—if not their precise methods—by Facebook’s. As explained by Roger McNamee, author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, who was an early investor in Facebook and a longtime mentor to Mark Zuckerberg but has since become one of Facebook’s fiercest (and most knowledgeable) critics: The company’s business model “depends on advertising, which in turn depends on manipulating the attention of users so they see more ads. One of the best ways to manipulate attention is to appeal to outrage and fear, emotions that increase engagement.”41 Evoking outrage and fear is only part of the strategy.

Google even allows you to choose “the privacy settings that are right for you with your Privacy Checkup.”110 Facebook states, “You’re In Charge” and “in control of your Facebook experience.”111 Nor are advertisers forced to advertise with Google’s and Facebook’s networks. Other options remain. And publishers can always wean themselves off the Gamemakers’ advertising networks and charge for their products. But how real are any of these options? First, are we, the users, really in control? By one count, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, said, “You are in control of your data” forty-five times during the two congressional hearings, where he was called to testify after the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal.112 The scandal, contrary to this illusion—or delusion—of control, exposed how Cambridge Analytica accessed the Facebook data of up to eighty-seven million people, entirely unbeknownst to them, in order to develop techniques designed to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election.113 We typically view the Gamemaker as the servant that keeps providing us with services at no cost, rather than as the master that it really is.


pages: 406 words: 105,602

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

More than at any other time in history, these components can be combined without requiring explicit permission or a business-development relationship. As reddit and Hipmunk co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote in Without Their Permission, “The Internet is an open system: It works because you don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to be creative and because every address is equally accessible.”5 Imagine how Facebook would look if Mark Zuckerberg had needed to sign twenty partnership agreements before he was able to start experimenting with his idea on the Harvard campus. There’s an important paradox built into Silicon Valley’s veneration of the power of small teams. Startups are distinct from small businesses; most startups resolutely do not want to stay small.

The answer is that, instead of pedigree, we infer the quality of founders from the results they are able to deliver with limited resources, gambling on the chance that early success will be the hallmark of future greatness. Many investors believe that how a team runs the fund-raising process predicts how they’ll run a company, and use it as a leading indicator. There’s a now-famous interview with Mark Zuckerberg, back when he was building what he called “TheFacebook.com,” in which he’s very passionate about his idea, but also not very clear about it. In a traditional business setting, people wouldn’t have invested in his idea after listening to his description. He said, “I really just want to create a really cool college directory product that is very relevant for students.

Even the very best investors, the ones we laud for their “golden gut,” get it wrong more often than they get it right. The only way to win in this world is to take more shots on goal. Try more radical things. Pay close attention to what works and what doesn’t. And double down on the winners. A STARTUP IS MISSION—AND VISION—DRIVEN Outside of Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg’s declaration that “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services”20 was met with eye rolls. But in Silicon Valley, we really believe it. Silicon Valley is obsessed with vision and the visionary founder who can uniquely execute it. This focus has been a source of some controversy as Lean Startup has become more popular.


pages: 407 words: 108,030

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

Whether or not Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be the “arbiter of truth,” so many people get their news from his website that perhaps it already is. Steven Levy, “Mark Zuckerberg Is an Arbiter of Truth—Whether He Likes It or Not,” Wired, June 5, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-is-an-arbiter-of-truth-whether-he-likes-it-or-not/. 34. Tony Romm, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Says in Interview He Fears ‘Erosion of Truth’ but Defends Allowing Politicians to Lie in Ads,” Washington Post, October 17, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-says-interview-he-fears-erosion-truth-defends-allowing-politicians-lie-ads/. 35.

According to one February 2020 study out of Brown University, 25 percent of all tweets promoting climate denial come from bots.32 We’ve already seen how many Flat Earthers and anti-vaxxers are converted through YouTube videos. But what can be done about the spread of science denial on social media? During the pandemic, some social media companies stepped up their efforts to combat false information and conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Prior to the pandemic, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had struggled with the idea of whether it was Facebook’s job to police the sort of misinformation that was shared on his site.33 Famously, in 2019, he said that although he feared the erosion of truth, “I don’t think people want to live in a world where you can only say things that tech companies decide are 100 percent true.”34 At that time, the subject of conversation was misleading political ads (which he decided to allow).35 By the time of the pandemic—at least for misinformation about the coronavirus—Zuckerberg changed his tune.


pages: 168 words: 50,647

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

If there was a better chance to be successful (on better terms) out there waiting for me, why wasn’t someone investigating my school for cruelly allowing me to graduate into this job market? What Are Jobs and Entrepreneurship? We hear the word “job” and imagine that someone is squirreled away in a cubicle, mindlessly filling out TPS reports for Proctor and Gamble. We hear the word “entrepreneur” and imagine Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Those are all true characterizations, but these two concepts leave a wide berth in between. How do we clearly distinguish between “jobs” and “entrepreneurship?” In his book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, Seth Godin defines a linchpin as: “[A]n individual who can walk into chaos and create order, someone who can invent, connect, create and make things happen.”

Would-be entrepreneurs imagine having to go out and buy a lot of physical equipment, hire staff, and rent office space. For a large and growing number of businesses, that’s no longer the case. The Social Network, the movie chronicling Facebook’s rise to a multi-billion dollar company depicts Mark Zuckerberg starting Facebook in his college dorm room. Basecamp, a multi-million dollar project management software company, was started by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, while living in different countries and while also running a web development consultancy. But it’s not just tech companies.

Dan Ariely, Uri Gneezy, George Lowenstein, and Nina Mazar, “Large Stakes and Big Mistakes,” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper No. 05-11, July 23, 2005 59. Pink, Daniel H. (2011-04-05). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us 60. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h5cY7d6nPU 61. http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg-luck-day-facebook-turned-down-billion-dollars.html 62. Pink, Daniel H. (2011-04-05). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Kindle Locations 1836-1848). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. Conclusion 63. JFK’s speech at Rice University on September 12th, 1962 64. Source: Peter Thiel, Zero to One 65.


pages: 337 words: 86,320

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, working poor

David Kirkpatrick tells this story in his authorized account of the website’s history, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World. He dubs the introduction of News Feed “the biggest crisis Facebook has ever faced.” But Kirkpatrick reports that when he interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder and head of the rapidly growing company, the CEO was unfazed. The reason? Zuckerberg had access to digital truth serum: numbers on people’s clicks and visits to Facebook. As Kirkpatrick writes: Zuckerberg in fact knew that people liked the News Feed, no matter what they were saying in the groups.

Digital truth serum, on average, will show us that the world is worse than we have thought. Do we need to know this? Learning about Google searches, porn data, and who clicks on what might not make you think, “This is great. We can understand who we really are.” You might instead think, “This is horrible. We can understand who we really are.” But the truth helps—and not just for Mark Zuckerberg or others looking to attract clicks or customers. There are at least three ways that this knowledge can improve our lives. First, there can be comfort in knowing that you are not alone in your insecurities and embarrassing behavior. It can be nice to know others are insecure about their bodies.

The data tells us that some parts of America are better at giving kids a chance to escape poverty. So what places are best at giving people a chance to escape the grim reaper? We like to think of death as the great equalizer. Nobody, after all, can avoid it. Not the pauper nor the king, the homeless man nor Mark Zuckerberg. Everybody dies. But if the wealthy can’t avoid death, data tells us that they can now delay it. American women in the top 1 percent of income live, on average, ten years longer than American women in the bottom 1 percent of income. For men, the gap is fifteen years. How do these patterns vary in different parts of the United States?


pages: 302 words: 84,881

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

In Autonomist Marxist debates, starting from the times of Potere Operaio in the 1970s, it was viewed as a means to remunerate that productive activity which happens outside the workplace, at a time at which value production is dependent on social, cultural and linguistic processes. More recently, UBI has been proposed as a solution to the automation revolution and its negative effects on employment. Personalities from the Silicon Valley, including Mark Zuckerberg, have thrown their hats in favour of basic income, signalling a growing interest also from some capitalist sectors towards this measure. Podemos has proposed the introduction of this measure on a universal basis. The Five Star Movement has instead adopted it as a synonym for a jobseekers’ allowance, along the lines of the one available in the United Kingdom, or the Hartz IV welfare reform in Germany, with the transfer being conditional on the acceptance of employment opportunities.

Whereas in the industrial era, the party styled itself after the Fordist factory, in these times of social media and apps it has come to adopt the quality of Facebook and other digital companies known under the collective acronym of FAANGs. Looking at the doings of formations such as the Pirate Parties, the Five Star Movement and Podemos, it soon becomes apparent that what these organisations propose is a political translation of the operational model that brought to success figures such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, applying the logic of the digital company to the political arena to reap economies of scale in the way they reach out to their supporters and involve them in online discussions and decisions. This tendency has been seen in their enthusiastic adoption of social media of all sorts, with many of these formations rapidly gathering a large following on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Iglesias revealed that he bought his clothes at the cheap shop Alcampo. Similarly, Mélenchon has carefully avoided the bourgeoise suit and tie and made himself recognisable by wearing the ‘Mao suit’, similar to the one worn by Mao Tse-Tung. Curiously, this unassuming style of dress resembles the one of Silicon Valley executives such as Mark Zuckerberg, who famously often wears sneakers and a hoodie even in highly formal circumstances. Mélenchon has also used YouTube to convey a more personable and authentic image than the one sported on official occasions. As described by Antonie Leaument, coordinator of social media for France Insoumise, ‘When I watch Mé-lenchon on YouTube, I see him the way he actually is.


pages: 276 words: 81,153

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

There is a real buzz about the progress being made and a friendly rivalry between the groups. Some of these engineers and mathematicians believe we are only a decade or so from true AI. Others see it as centuries away. I wondered what their bosses made of all the excitement. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Bacterial Brain In 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg set himself a challenge: to build an automated butler that would help him around the house. The name of his butler, Jarvis, was inspired by an AI robot built by the character Iron Man from the comic and film series The Avengers. The fictional Jarvis has a human-like intelligence, reading Iron Man’s thoughts and connecting emotionally with him.

When I had looked at algorithms that tried to influence us, I found out that they were exploiting some very simple aspects of our behaviour to decide what search information to show us and what to try to sell us. Neural networks have cracked a few games, but we can’t yet see a way up the next mountain. When Alex and I built our own language bot, it could fool us for a few sentences before revealing itself as a total fake. At the end of his year-long challenge to build Jarvis, the butler, Mark Zuckerberg put a video up on Facebook demonstrating the results. I have to warn you before you watch his upload that it is pure cringe. We are welcomed into Mark’s bedroom as he wakes up in his trademark grey T-shirt. Jarvis informs Mark about his daily meetings and reports that he has been entertaining his one-year-old daughter with a ‘Mandarin lesson’ since she woke up.

His final product is a masterclass in practical application of the techniques we have seen in this book: face and voice recognition through convolutional neural networks, a form of regression model used to predict when he wants some toast or his daughter wants to learn Mandarin and ‘also like’ algorithms for choosing music that the whole family want to listen to. Facebook has developed a library of programming routines that helps its employees, and in this case Mark Zuckerberg, turn these algorithms into applications. When I get over the corniness of his video, and delve more deeply into his blog post, I realise that Zuckerberg is pretty smart (I know I might be a bit late on this one). He makes the grade as a data alchemist. While his fellow Silicon Valley colleagues are trying to prove their intellectual credentials by sitting on panel groups hosted by theoretical physicists, Mark is getting stuck into programming interfaces and working out how to make the most of the tools his company has created.


pages: 387 words: 112,868

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

While lounging at Blue Marlin, one of the trendy island’s most famous beach clubs, David noticed two tall men with waves of glossy brown hair, who would have drawn his attention even if they weren’t Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The Winklevoss twins had become a cultural phenomenon owing to their involvement with Mark Zuckerberg when they were all undergraduates at Harvard. Zuckerberg had initially teamed up with the brothers to build a social networking site, but when Zuckerberg went off on his own and created Facebook, the twins sued him, claiming he stole their idea. They eventually won a $65 million settlement and the story inspired the Oscar-winning film The Social Network.

The next day Erik and Ira sent in their resignations and moved into the offices of Larry Lenihan and FirstMark Capital; Lenihan had always been more interested in investing in Erik than in Charlie. Charlie, Roger, and Erik were in constant conversation, contemplating whether Charlie should join Erik, and if the whole group should sue the Winklevoss twins. They ultimately decided not to sue—mindful of the way the twins had responded when Mark Zuckerberg left them out of Facebook. Charlie decided he couldn’t leave the company he created, but when he went to work the next day, he did not go in peace. He demanded that Maguire Ventures deliver the final installment of the investment it had agreed to make the previous fall: “You guys are screwing up my company, and Ira and Erik left because of it.

But Charlie was clearly, and unsurprisingly, lacking skills as a manager. In many startups this is something that investors might notice, and help fix, by finding an experienced manager to come in and steer the ship. As it turned out, though, Charlie’s investors didn’t have much more experience working with startups than he did. The twins’ early experience with Mark Zuckerberg had been limited and, since setting out to become tech investors the previous year, they had worked with only a few young companies. With Charlie, the twins had initially adopted a hands-off attitude, despite all the bickering. But as problems became more evident, they talked with Charlie’s chief programmer about replacing Charlie as CEO.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. —UPTON SINCLAIR, AMERICAN POLITICAL ACTIVIST, AND AUTHOR OF THE JUNGLE REALITY: Rich white men benefit from compounding unearned advantages. The wealthy philanthropist I interviewed in 2019 is an incredible American success story. I’ll call him Mark, after Mark Zuckerberg, because he, too, is a tech titan. The odds were against this Mark becoming a CEO of one of America’s most powerful companies. Mark describes his upbringing in a mostly white suburb in Colorado as “solid middle class, lower middle class,” but after he sold his pioneering company for $3 billion, he now lives among the ultrarich in a $20 million mansion in Atherton, California, the moneyed suburb that houses much of the Silicon Valley elite.

At the same time, though, I don’t want to imply that height carries the equivalent weight of other identity-based hundred advantages like socioeconomic status, gender, and race. I couldn’t find a specific study that analyzes these intersections explicitly, but I find it telling that there are more short white men worth at least $50 billion—Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Michael Bloomberg, Michael Dell, Charles Koch, Jim Walton, Mark Zuckerberg are all at most five foot seven—than there are Black people of any height who are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Nor do I want to suggest that gender inequities specifically would be resolved if American society had more tall women, since height is also another prism through which women face a double bind: tall women are perceived to be more masculine,7 which may help to explain why they can sometimes access additional leadership opportunities, but that same perception also leads some men to conclude that they are less likable and less fit for promotions.

Half of Jewish Americans report annual household incomes above $100,000, and one-quarter report incomes above $200,000.30 While Jewish Americans are less than 2 percent of the American population, they make up 9 percent of US senators and a third of America’s billionaires.31 Jewish billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg—whose combined wealth exceeds $500 billion—are five of America’s ten wealthiest people.32 But every ethnic group that has accessed American power has one thing in common: rich white men eventually deemed their light skin as assimilable into whiteness.


pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Should a newspaper become part of that network, or would its chances of survival be greatest by remaining separate, and distinct, from it? The talkboards were certainly ahead of their time. Someone later described them as ‘Web 2.0 social networking before Zuckerberg was a Harvard freshman’. It was when Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard in September 2003 that he started playing around with ways of linking up communities of students – four years after the first stumbling efforts on the Guardian and elsewhere. Reddit – with an equally unsophisticated interface – started five years after the Guardian talkboards as ‘the front page of the internet’ and, with 250 million unique monthly users, was by 2017 the ninth-biggest website in the world.

• Everyone agreed that intelligence involved intrusion – and that it was vital that the work of the agencies was effectively and independently overseen. But were the oversight mechanisms up to the job? (We were later to see a public display of many legislators’ unfamiliarity with technology in April 2018 when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg grappled with the incoherent questioning of several Senators who appeared to have rudimentary knowledge of what social media was, or how it was funded.) • Proportionality. Was there convincing evidence that bulk data collection and storage was necessary and proportionate? Security chiefs insisted yes.

The minute you’d learned the basics of audio podcasting the commercial team (not to mention Facebook) were mouthing the latest mantra: pivot to video. You’d get up to speed on platforms, only to be told it was all about personalisation. You might think you understood data, only to learn it was now all about structured data. You’d crack your platform strategy only for Mark Zuckerberg to change his mind. Joanna Geary,10 whom we’d hired in 2011 to look after social media, posted on Facebook in late 2017: About 10 years ago I thought I might need to learn Ruby on Rails [to build web apps] to understand what’s going on in journalism. Then, about 5 years after that, I thought I might need an MBA.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

Seven straight years of revenue declines tended to “focus the mind,” as Don Graham liked to say. Graham was beloved in the Post newsroom for his first-name familiarity with staff and his zeal for the journalistic mission. But under his cautious eye, the Post had reached an impasse. Graham had reached an agreement in 2005 with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to invest in the budding social network, but then he allowed Zuckerberg to withdraw from the deal and take money at a higher valuation from the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel instead. Having forfeited a historic company-enriching windfall, Graham joined Facebook’s board of directors, where for the next few years he listened to Zuckerberg preach that content on the web should be free.

Sanchez claimed to be working as the middleman. Simpson and her editors in New York could only guess at the identities of the mystery lovers. In emails later made public as part of a lawsuit Michael Sanchez filed against AMI in L.A. district court, the journalists speculated about figures like Evan Spiegel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Michael Dell. For weeks, Sanchez kept them guessing and tried to bump up his asking price by hinting at the possibility that the story could end up with a British tabloid. In early October, he teased the matter further, meeting with Simpson and showing her text messages and photos with the faces obscured.

For Bezos and his advisors though, who were still trying to positively spin the embarrassing events surrounding his divorce, such a cloud of uncertainty was at the very least distracting from the more unsavory and complicated truth. * * * As the entire mêlée quieted over the course of 2019, Bezos and Lauren Sanchez started appearing together in public. In July, they attended the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, mingling with the likes of Warren Buffett, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg. A few days later, they watched the Wimbledon men’s finals from the Royal Box, three rows behind Prince William and Kate Middleton. In August, they gamboled in the western Mediterranean Sea on the super yacht of mogul David Geffen. There were also trips to Solomeo, Italy, for a summit organized by luxury designer Brunello Cucinelli and to Venice, aboard the mega yacht of Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg.


Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

And we haven’t even talked about information warfare or synthetic biology. The point is, good intelligence oversight requires much more technical knowledge than it used to—and Congress doesn’t have it. In 2020, Congress had 210 lawyers but just 32 engineers.144 There were only three engineers in the entire U.S. Senate.145 When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before a joint hearing of the Senate’s Commerce and Judiciary Committees in April 2018 to discuss privacy issues and Russian disinformation, it was a jaw-dropping moment revealing just how little senators knew about the products and companies that are transforming global politics, commerce, and civil society.146 Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asked whether Twitter was the same thing as Facebook.

Deepfake application tools are now widely available online and so simple to use that high school students with no coding background can create convincing forgeries. In May 2019, anonymous users doctored a video to make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appear drunk, which went viral on Facebook. When the social media giant refused to take it down, two artists and a small technology startup created a deepfake of Mark Zuckerberg and posted it on Instagram. In August, the Wall Street Journal reported the first known use of deepfake audio to impersonate a voice in a cyber heist. Believing he was talking to his boss, an energy executive transferred $243,000. The voice turned out to be an AI-based imitation that was so real, it even had the boss’s slight German accent and lilt.

The White House suspended Acosta’s press credential, prompting outcries.120 A few months later, a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was distorted to make her sound drunk and posted on social media, where it was viewed two million times and made headline news.121 When Facebook refused to remove the fake Pelosi video, two British artists posted their own doctored video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claiming he wanted to “control billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets” and thanking Spectre, the fictional evil organization from James Bond stories.122 These “cheapfakes” used rudimentary technology that was relatively easy to spot. Deception is going to get much worse, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence fueling the development of deepfake digital impersonation technology.


pages: 210 words: 56,667

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

Its functionality was patented (now held by LinkedIn). In December 2000, Six Degrees was sold to Youthstream Media Networks for $125 million. A success by all accounts. We asked Weinreich whether it upset him to see Six Degrees fade away, only to be replaced by other, wildly successful social networking sites. Did he resent Mark Zuckerberg and the success of Facebook? “Absolutely not,” Weinreich told us. “When people copy stuff that is contemporaneous, it is more upsetting than when they do it later.” So time and space make copying easier to take. He added: “It’s weird today to come up with an idea that nobody is doing.” Six Degrees was launched eight years before Facebook.

Hackers pioneered many principles of informality that have since come to infect mainstream work culture. These include: problem-based work, a culture of openness and transparency, reputational and peer-based accountability (instead of rigid hierarchies and managers), and the permission to act on new opportunities. In a letter to potential investors, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook described the company’s culture and unique management approach, which he dubbed “The Hacker Way.”16 “Hacking,” Zuckerberg wrote, “is a means of building something or testing the boundaries of what can be done.” He went on to describe hackers as people obsessed with continuous improvement and incessant iteration, believing that there is always room to do better and “that nothing is ever complete.”

Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates (Conway Maritime Press, 2002). 9. Leeson, The Invisible Hook. 10. Ibid. 11. Rediker, Villains of All Nations. 12. Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. 13. Leeson, The Invisible Hook. 14. Rediker, Villains of All Nations. 15. Ibid. 16. Epicenter Staff, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter to Investors: ‘The Hacker Way,’ ” Wired, February 1, 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/02/zuck-letter/. 17. Ivan Arreguín-Toft, “How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict,” International Security 26, no. 1 (Summer 2001): 93–128. 18. Moises Naim, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy (London: Arrow, 2007). 19.


pages: 208 words: 57,602

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

Today, I upload my audio files to an automated transcription service, which uses a machine-learning-powered speech-to-text engine to transcribe my audio files in seconds. Automating my transcriptions hasn’t always gone smoothly. (The app tends to make some pretty amusing errors, like the time I was interviewing a confidant of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and it transcribed “Zuck’s inclination” as “sexy clinician.”) But it has saved me hundreds of hours over the years, and freed up time to report and write. But despite labor-saving innovations like these, there is no evidence that today’s workers are happier than workers of previous generations.

“If your users feel friction using or signing up for your service, you have a problem,” Mulligan wrote. “Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but you should do everything in your power to remove as much friction as possible.” I first encountered the idea of frictionless design in 2011, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was introducing a new feature called “frictionless sharing.” The feature—which allowed certain apps, like Netflix and Spotify, to post directly to users’ feeds, rather than having to ask for permission each time—was a failure, and Facebook killed it fairly quickly. But the idea of a “frictionless” product captured Silicon Valley’s imagination.

The French researcher Camille Roth divides Camille Roth, “Algorithmic Distortion of Informational Landscapes,” Intellectica (2019). Amazon engineer Brent Smith Brent Smith and Greg Linden, “Two Decades of Recommender Systems at Amazon.com,” IEEE Computer Society (2017). Brenden Mulligan, a tech entrepreneur Brenden Mulligan, “Reduce Friction, Increase Happiness,” TechCrunch, October 16, 2011. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Brittany Darwell, “Facebook’s Frictionless Sharing Mistake,” Adweek, January 22, 2013. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, “2018 Letter to Shareholders,” Amazon.com, 2018. Uber drivers lost out on millions of dollars Arik Jenkins, “Why Uber Doesn’t Want a Built-In Tipping Option,” Fortune, April 18, 2017.


pages: 343 words: 91,080

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (New York: New Press, 2017), ch. 9; The Movement for Black Lives, “Platform,” n.d., https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/. 15. Chris Hughes, Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018). 16. Todd Haselton, “Mark Zuckerberg Joins Silicon Valley Bigwigs in Calling for Government to Give Everybody Free Money,” CNBC, May 25, 2017, www.cnbc.com/2017/05/25/mark-zuckerberg-calls-for-universal-basic-income-at-harvard-speech.html. 17. Eric A. Posner and Glen E. Weyl, “Property Is Only Another Name for Monopoly,” Journal of Legal Analysis (January 31, 2017), https://ssrn.com/abstract=2818494. 18.

While Occupy Wall Street activists formed a tent city in Zuccotti Park on Wall Street, members of Black Lives Matter were staging protests across the country to advocate a political agenda that could address the root causes of inequality.14 Soon, more voices joined the chorus, this time from the top. Facebook cofounder and philanthropist Chris Hughes dedicated his intellectual thought leadership to promoting a universal basic income,15 and Mark Zuckerberg, his former roommate, mentioned it in the commencement speech he gave at Harvard.16 This quasi-moral solution to income inequality—and to expanding the definition of equality for this generation—finds its strongest American proponents in Silicon Valley. Home to the billion-dollar titans of industry, who form a slightly reluctant political elite in the New Economy, Silicon Valley and the culture of technology radiate influence across the business, political, and media culture of major American cities.

Drivers aren’t “happiness engineers” or “code ninjas.”8 THE LEGEND OF SILICON VALLEY It shouldn’t be surprising that Uber has adopted the myth of tech entrepreneurship: after all, the company was started by such entrepreneurs. Travis Kalanick, the most visible cofounder of Uber, is hailed as one of Silicon Valley’s “Great Men.” The Great Man theory of success celebrates America’s technology founder-heroes for their business acumen and their passion, like Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg. The Silicon Valley “Great Men” typically celebrated are white men. Equally accomplished founders who are not white men tend to get less play—like Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, according to longtime Silicon Valley journalist, Sarah Lacy.9 The meritocratic theory of success has crossed class lines and entered the culture of work embraced by most people in the United States.


pages: 311 words: 90,172

Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

Nothing other than Google is as widely used by so much of the human population. And this ubiquity itself has been controversial. How did Facebook become so large? Just how influential and powerful has Facebook become? And exactly who is in charge of this massive platform? What if Mark Zuckerberg were to be succeeded by Lex Luthor? What if Mark Zuckerberg secretly is Lex Luthor? Call it the curse of ubiquity. There are other reasons Facebook has been so controversial. Some of the content shared on its platform has been deeply disturbing. On March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant livestreamed on Facebook his mass murder of 51 innocent civilians in Christchurch, New Zealand.

FB shares would eventually recover to that $218 high by early 2020 and then dramatically rise above it in the latter part of the year. But that 43% correction was massive and painful. And it was almost entirely self-inflicted. On July 25, 2018, Facebook announced its June quarter earnings, and its stock tanked (Figure 2.1). Here are the two key parts of that earnings call that did the damage (emphasis added). Mark Zuckerberg: Looking ahead, we will continue to invest heavily in security and privacy because we have a responsibility to keep people safe. But as I’ve said on past calls, we’re investing so much in security that it will significantly impact our profitability. We’re starting to see that this quarter. But in addition to this, we also have a responsibility to keep building services that bring people closer together in new ways as well.

There’s one in particular that has done long-term shareholders a great service by maintaining a long-term orientation. I’m not talking Amazon or Google or Netflix. I’m talking Facebook. Perhaps none of the top tech founders highlighted at the beginning of this lesson has been more surrounded by controversy than Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg. Bezos, Jobs, Gates, Page, Brin—none of them had a sensational Hollywood movie (The Social Network) released about them and their company while they were still running a private company. Their IPO roadshow attire didn’t stir investor debate in the way that Zuckerberg’s hoodie did—“Hoodiegate!”


pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

On the United States, see Zeynep Tufekci, “Zuckerberg’s Preposterous Defense of Facebook,” New York Times, September 29, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/opinion/mark-zuckerberg-facebook.html?mcubz=3; Zeynep Tufekci, “Facebook’s Ad Scandal Isn’t a ‘Fail,’ It’s a Feature,” New York Times, September 23, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/opinion/sunday/facebook-ad-scandal.html; and Zeynep Tufekci, “Mark Zuckerberg Is in Denial,” New York Times, November 15, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/opinion/mark-zuckerberg-is-in-denial.html. 2. Jefferson Chase, “Facebook Slams Proposed German ‘Anti-hate Speech’ Social Media Law,” Deutsche Welle, May 29, 2017, http://www.dw.com/en/facebook-slams-proposed-german-anti-hate-speech-social-media-law/a-39021094. 3.

Hate Speech on the Internet,” Insights on Law and Society 13, no. 2 (2013), https://www.americanbar.org/publications/insights_on_law_andsociety/13/winter_2013/who_decides_civilityvhatespeechontheinternet.html. 4. Though much remains to be done, the major social networks have started to take their responsibilities more seriously in this regard. See Todd Spangler, “Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook Will Hire 3,000 Staffers to Review Violent Content, Hate Speech,” Variety, May 3, 2017, http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-violent-hate-speech-hiring-1202407969/. See also this interesting proposal for a mix between regulation and self-government: Robinson Meyer, “A Bold New Scheme to Regulate Facebook,” Atlantic, May 12, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/how-could-the-us-regulate-facebook/482382/.


pages: 98 words: 27,201

Are Chief Executives Overpaid? by Deborah Hargreaves

banking crisis, benefit corporation, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, business climate, corporate governance, Donald Trump, G4S, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, loadsamoney, long term incentive plan, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, performance metric, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Snapchat, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, wealth creators

Walter Chrysler, who founded the eponymous car company, was profiled in 1928, and Harlow Curtice, president of General Motors, in 1955 – the year after GM became the first US company to post profits of more than $1 billion. After that was Ted Turner, who founded the TV channel CNN in 1991, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, featured in 1999, and Mark Zuckerberg who started Facebook, in 2010. Mr Chrysler was paid $1 million in 1920 and 1921 – a huge amount at the time – when weekly wages at the firm were $31. Mr Chrysler’s annual income was 620 times that of his employees. By the 1950s, remuneration for top bosses had levelled off somewhat, with Mr Curtice earning $800,000 at his peak; with average pay at $3,301, he was taking home 242 times the norm.

In 2013, Fortune magazine estimated his net worth at $2.2 billion. These riches are dwarfed by the personal fortunes of today’s technology entrepreneurs, however. In 2018, Jeff Bezos was the richest man in the world with net wealth of $115 billion, since he remains the largest shareholder in Amazon. Mark Zuckerberg takes a salary of only $1 from Facebook, but his shareholding in the social-networking company means he has a net worth of $73 billion. This is in the context of the stagnation in wages for the average American at just over $37,500 a year. Business at the heart of government One of the reasons for the huge growth in top pay in the West in the past 20 years is the establishment of the business culture at the heart of government.


pages: 216 words: 61,061

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed by Alexis Ohanian

Airbnb, barriers to entry, carbon-based life, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, Hans Rosling, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Occupy movement, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, software is eating the world, Startup school, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, unpaid internship, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Now any individual—an undergrad at UVA, a comedian from Austin with cerebral palsy, a farmer in Missouri, or a public school teacher from the Bronx—can transform the way we all live. As value creation shifts from well-connected MBAs to the innovators themselves, so does wealth creation. Whatever you think of the world’s youngest billionaires, Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook crew, they’re just the beginning. The Forbes list of richest people—or its future equivalent—is going to have far fewer businesspeople and far more creators on it. If this seems obvious to you, great: I’ll be your Sacagawea-like guide as we meet scores of pioneers in their fields.

Outliers are outliers, remember, so instead of being disappointed when you’re not the next Facebook, be happy to be your own company that solves a real problem with an elegant solution and wins in a market that’s underserved. Investors want to know they’re going to get a return on their money despite the terrible odds, and investors realize that Mark Zuckerbergs aren’t born every day (thankfully, given the identity crisis Mark would have—though there is at least one child named Facebook in Egypt).13 Experience is traditionally undervalued in the tech sector because we’re accustomed to the wunderkind myth. But that being said, there are so many things I’d end up being smarter about if I had reddit to do all over again.

There’s a special kind of off-the-record camaraderie that exists within the walls of Y Combinator that allows guests to be far more candid than usual. This means that a roomful of hungry founders (remember, hungry for knowledge, because they’re full on glop) can probe the minds of leaders in their industry. Back then Y Combinator was so new that the speaker invite list was limited to Paul’s Boston network. But today the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and other famous startup CEOs show up. One of our speakers at that first dinner was a partner at Goodwin Procter, an international law firm, who patiently answered what must have seemed like inane questions from wide-eyed founders who at best had once taken a business law class. Afterward, the speakers lingered, and founders queued to follow up—the law partner not only ended up sticking around and chatting, he would also go on to represent us during our acquisition.


pages: 190 words: 62,941

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

All the same, Kalanick was present nearly at the creation of Uber, and he supplied the critical insight that transformed someone else’s idea from merely interesting to undeniably groundbreaking. He has been Uber’s iron-fisted, omnipresent CEO from the time it first gained traction and began expanding beyond San Francisco. As a result, Uber has become as identified with Kalanick as Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook are with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively. Whether or not Uber becomes as powerful and highly valued as these enduring technology-industry titans, its CEO already has become an object of fascination and, for many, repulsion. In the short period that Uber went from an idea to the biggest of the so-called unicorns—privately held start-ups valued at more than $1 billion, once a rarity—Kalanick became world famous for his ruthlessness, lack of empathy, and willingness to flout anybody else’s rules.

It has built a substantial, global, sometimes profitable business that has wreaked havoc on incumbent players from taxi companies to rental-car agencies. Operating from a playbook he devised more or less himself, Travis Kalanick also has defied the odds. A college dropout like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg before him, unlike them he knew failure first and then only modest success. He burst onto the world stage more fully formed than those gawky youths, yet his edges were every bit as rough, his ambition possibly greater. As with all success stories, Kalanick’s path was anything but linear, and Uber’s continued dominance of its chosen markets is anything but guaranteed.

“The first billion-dollar deal that blew people’s minds,” he exclaims proudly. We take an elevator to the eleventh floor, where Kalanick has created an austere setting, a place to mimic the entrepreneurial environment, with exposed drywall and smaller-than-usual desks. “When you’re an entrepreneur, at least the ninety-nine percent of entrepreneurs that are not Mark Zuckerberg, you have hard times,” he says. “So this right here is what I call the cave, because when you’re going through hard times you’re in the dark, you’re literally in some dark place. It’s a metaphor.” I ask if the desks, which Kalanick proudly tells me are “tighter by a foot,” are a nod to Jeff Bezos, who long decreed that desks at Amazon be made of doors, a common practice in the giant’s early days.


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

The economy is dominated by chains and market leaders that are too big, too powerful, and too aggressive to compete with. As chains have grown, businesses that were once low-hanging fruit have evolved into precise machines that are harder to take on by the day. It’s not like a new burger spot is competing against the McDonald brothers of the 1940s. It’s not like a new social app is competing against Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room. They’re competing against the world’s most powerful companies right now. A new company has to start out offering a service far better than what the market leaders offered when they first started, and as good as—if not better than—what they offer now. And just as cheap. The bar to building a successful business keeps moving higher.

In headlines: The war for tech dominance. The streaming media arms race. The Great Tech War of 2012. The Great AI War. Keeping count of Silicon Valley casualties. In news stories: Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s texts and emails included phrases like “war time,” “burn the village,” and “pound of flesh.” Mark Zuckerberg was reported to have told his leaders that Facebook was at “war” after it faced criticism for its role in election interference. In everyday business vernacular: Destroy the competition. Poach employees. Capture a market. Make a killing. This kind of language had nothing to do with building a strong organization, making good decisions, or improving the status quo.

These are the ten wealthiest people in the world in 2019: Jeff Bezos (Amazon) Bill Gates (Microsoft) Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway) Bernard Arnault (LVMH) Carlos Slim Helu (America Movil) Amancio Ortega (Zara) Larry Ellison (Oracle) Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg LP) Larry Page (Alphabet/Google) Are these the ten happiest people in the world? Probably not. But they’re probably not the ten least happy people either. The costs of being not-rich are significant. Especially now.


pages: 247 words: 60,543

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

Visa and MasterCard, Amex and Discover, Unionpay and all the others have delivered convenient e-money to everyone on Earth (well, everyone on Earth with a bank account, plus some prepaid cards around the edges), and they have been astonishingly good at it. When I get off a plane in Sydney or Samarkand, I expect to be able to stroll into my hotel and pay with my chip-and-PIN Amex card. But I cannot yet send money to anyone in the world as easily as I can send them a photo (to steal a phrase from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg). For that, we need the e-cash that we do not yet have. Since the early days of the new internet age (which I date from 1994, the year of the Netscape IPO), the evolutionary tree of e-cash has been growing to the point where digital currency is now not only a possibility but a racing certainty.

It suggests to us that new financial market infrastructure may be on the horizon, and that the lasting impact of shared ledger technology will not be implementing current banking processes in a new way but creating new kinds of markets and therefore new kinds of institutions. In the blue corner: Libra A scheme to implement a private digital currency based on a shared ledger has already been put forward by Facebook. And, because it is being put forward by Facebook, it is a big deal. A really big deal. Mark Zuckerberg once observed that ‘in a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company’ (Conway 2019). Indeed it is, and perhaps it is about to become even more so, thanks to Facebook’s plans to introduce a currency of its own. This currency is called Libra, and the media has been full of commentary about both the new blockchain that will support it (created by the Libra Network) and the new wallets that will store it (created by Calibra, a Facebook subsidiary).

We will still be able to do business together, because exchanges on our AI smartphones shall make it so. Who will win the currency wars? The truth is that, after setting down part 3 of this book, I do not know any more than anyone else knows. I can say that I doubt Libra is the future of digital currency (many observers have noted that Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Vision for 2030’, published on Facebook in January 2020, did not mention Libra at all), but it is certainly a catalyst for thinking about the future of digital money. What I am more certain about is that there are some people who are taking the notion of an imminent currency cold war seriously, who have a strategy for the battles to come and a long-term plan to win them.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

Perry Link, ‘China: The Anaconda in the Chandelier’, New York Review of Books, 11 April 2001, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2002/apr/11/china-the-anaconda-in-the-chandelier/ 123. in a conversation I had about this with Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook headquarters on 15 September 2011, it was clear that she felt a very strong commercial interest in going into China but was well aware of the potential reputational damage if, for example, someone were to be persecuted in China as a result of something they had posted on the Chinese version of Facebook. See also Evelyn Walls, ‘Mark Zuckerberg’s speech: a political statement about the future of Facebook?’, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/discuss/mark-zuckerbergs-speech-a-political-statement-about-the-future-of-facebook/ 124. see Wekesa et al. 2014. I am most grateful to Markos Kounalakis for this reference and early sight of chapters of his forthcoming book. For a somewhat contrary view, see Iginio Gagliardone, ‘Is China Actually Helping Free Media in Africa?’

New words must be coined to describe the number of bytes—the basic unit of digital memory, usually consisting of an ‘octet’ string of eight 1s and 0s—of information stored online: from the megabytes (MB, or 1,0002 bytes) and gigabytes (GB, or 1,0003 bytes) we have on our personal computers, all the way to the exabyte, zettabyte and yottabyte, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual bytes.23 According to an estimate by Cisco, it would take you about 6 million years to watch all the videos crossing global networks in a single month.24 As of 2015, there are already somewhere around 3 billion internet users, depending exactly how you define internet and user, and that number is growing rapidly.25 The fastest growth will come in the non-Western world, in wireless rather than wired and especially on mobile devices. There are perhaps 2 billion smartphones across the world and that is projected to reach 4 billion by 2020.26 Some 85 percent of the world’s population is within reach of a mobile phone tower which has the capacity to relay data. Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Zuckerberg have been among those campaigning to achieve internet access for all.27 Billions of people are still excluded from this unprecedented network of communication. As Map 1 shows, internet access is very unevenly distributed across the globe. Map 1. Unequal internet use worldwide Country sizes are proportionate to absolute numbers of users.

In countries such as Indonesia and Thailand, surveys have found a larger number of respondents saying they use Facebook than say they use the internet. In Nigeria, Indonesia, India and Brazil, more than half those asked in a poll commissioned by Quartz magazine agreed with the statement ‘Facebook is the internet’. Mark Zuckerberg’s internet.org aims to ‘bring the internet to the two thirds of the world’s population that doesn’t have it’, but (at this writing) its showcase app only provides free access to Facebook, Facebook Messenger and a handful of other services. So is internet.org bringing the underprivileged of the world to the internet or just to Facebook?


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Given the aforementioned privacy violations we’ve seen from the search giant, what else might it be capable of as we enter the age of wearable surveillance? The Social Network and Its Inventory—You Of course Google is not alone in its business model of selling you to its advertisers, and there are thousands of companies around the world that do the exact same thing, including most notably Facebook. Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room at Harvard in 2004, Facebook is the iconic Silicon Valley success story. With more than 1.2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is by far the largest social network in the world. It has succeeded by getting people to talk about themselves in ways never previously imagined.

Viewed another way, Facebook’s billion-plus users, each dutifully typing in status updates, detailing his biography, and uploading photograph after photograph, have become the largest unpaid workforce in history. As a result of their free labor, Facebook has a market cap of $182 billion, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has a personal net worth of $33 billion. What did you get out of the deal? As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier reminds us, a company such as Instagram—which Facebook bought in 2012—was not valued at $1 billion because its thirteen employees were so “extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.”

But I’ve Got Nothing to Hide In December 2009, when CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo asked Google’s own CEO, Eric Schmidt, about privacy concerns resulting from Google’s increasing tracking of consumers, Schmidt famously replied, “If you have something that you don’t want anybody to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Schmidt, and others, dismiss privacy concerns by saying that if you haven’t done anything wrong, you should not be afraid of people (corporations, governments, or your neighbors) knowing what you are doing. This sentiment has been echoed by Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who has argued that “privacy is no longer the social norm.” While privacy may no longer be the norm—at least for the general public—in his own life, Mr. Zuckerberg seems to treasure privacy quite a bit. In late 2013, it was revealed that the Facebook CEO spent $30 million to buy the four homes surrounding his own property in order to ensure his privacy would remain free from intrusion or disturbance.


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The Happiness Effect: How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost by Donna Freitas

4chan, fear of failure, Joan Didion, Jon Ronson, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk, Year of Magical Thinking

But at this highly prestigious institution, students are used to engaging critically with everything. They don’t need to be invited—they just do it. And knowledge—in the form of critical analysis—quite literally seems to translate into power. Being able to think clearly about social media, believing that they have the intellectual skills to best Mark Zuckerberg at his own game and understand some of the more manipulative ways that social media infiltrates our lives and relationships, gives them a healthier, more empowered relationship to it. Plus, their academics seem far more enticing and central to their lives than anything that can happen on social media; and this, too, provides them a sort of protective shield that I did not see among the rest of the interviewees—at least not so consistently.

But, yeah, I think through people, because people are the ones that are using Facebook, and God can use people, so if He can use people to do anything, to preach in a pulpit, to sing a song, He can use them to type an encouraging message on Facebook, or spread hope or love through a post that could uplift others, or encourage them to continue, you know, the fight or whatever.” It’s not as if social media is holy, Jennifer wants to reassure me, it’s just that the Lord works in mysterious ways and sometimes it’s through Mark Zuckerberg, even if he doesn’t realize it. “I’m pretty sure [social media] wasn’t created to glorify God, but it doesn’t really matter, I don’t think, because God can use anything.” Jennifer goes on to say that social media can also be a distraction from God if you’re not careful, and anything that distracts from God leads to unhappiness.

Take Javier, a senior philosophy major at a Midwestern Catholic college, who had been completely off social media accounts for eight months when we met. He and his girlfriend decided to quit together. He was thrilled about it. His relationship to social media had a definitive emotional arc: it started with amusement, then led to disenchantment and eventually full-on depression, which is why he stopped. Mark Zuckerberg makes it really hard to quit, he tells me, because Facebook keeps trying to lure you back. Javier has resisted so far and says he will continue to do so. He felt like he had a “chemical addiction” to social media, and quitting was really difficult at first—it created a “hole” in his life that he needed to find ways to fill—but it helped that he and his girlfriend were in it together.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

A social media billionaire keen to profit from the higher advertising revenue that video posts draw, compared to text ones, might recast that interest—and his rewriting of the powerful algorithms he owns to get what he wants—as a prediction that “I just think that we’re going to be in a world a few years from now where the vast majority of the content that people consume online will be video.” (New York magazine had skewered Mark Zuckerberg after he issued that prediction at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: “The Vast Majority of Web Content Will Be Video, Says Man Who Can Unilaterally Make Such a Decision.”) In the Valley, prediction has become a popular way of fighting for a particular future while claiming merely to be describing what has yet to occur.

It is hard to overstate how influential this belief has become in MarketWorld, especially in Silicon Valley: The world may be cruel and unfair, but if you sprinkle seeds of technology on it, shoots of equality will sprout. If every girl in Afghanistan had a smartphone…If every classroom were linked to the Web…If every police officer wore a body camera…Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have vowed to connect the unconnected as part of their philanthropic work, because the Internet “provides education if you don’t live near a good school. It provides health information on how to avoid diseases or raise healthy children if you don’t live near a doctor. It provides financial services if you don’t live near a bank.

He was on the boards of the city’s ballet, of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, of Friends of the High Line. He began to be first-name-dropped. You know, Darren was saying the other day…Darren and I were on a panel, and…One day he would be at a White House state dinner for the Chinese president; another day he would be in Silicon Valley helping Mark Zuckerberg reflect on his giving. Even as he was establishing himself in big philanthropy, there were constant reminders of what his and his colleagues’ efforts were persistently failing to change. He was at a gala one night when he received a text from his sister with photographs from the funeral of his aunt Bertha.


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Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, financial independence, game design, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Norman Mailer, obamacare, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QR code, rent control, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, wage slave, white picket fence

* * * — The final, and possibly most psychologically destructive, distortion of the social internet is its distortion of scale. This is not an accident but an essential design feature: social media was constructed around the idea that a thing is important insofar as it is important to you. In an early internal memo about the creation of Facebook’s News Feed, Mark Zuckerberg observed, already beyond parody, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” The idea was that social media would give us a fine-tuned sort of control over what we looked at. What resulted was a situation where we—first as individuals, and then inevitably as a collective—are essentially unable to exercise control at all.

And still, colleges sell themselves as the crucible through which every young person must pass to stand a chance of succeeding. Into this realm of uncertainty has come a new idea—that the path to stability might be a personal brand. The Social Media Scam The most successful millennial is surely thirty-five-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth fluctuates around the upper eleven digits. Lowballing it at $55 billion means that Zuckerberg has nearly five million times as much money as the median American household, which is worth $11,700. He is the eighth-richest person in the world. As the founder of Facebook, he effectively controls a nation-state: with a quarter of the world’s population using his website on a monthly basis, he can sway elections, and change the way we relate to one another, and control broad social definitions of what is acceptable and true.

In fact, substance may actually be anathema to the game. And with that, the applause roars, the iPhone cameras start snapping, and the keynote speaker at the women’s empowerment conference comes onstage. The Girlbosses The superficially begrudging self-styled icon Sophia Amoruso was born in 1984, the same year as Mark Zuckerberg. She appeared on the cover of her 2014 memoir #GIRLBOSS in a black deep-V dress with structured shoulders, short hair blown back by a wind machine, hands planted on her hips. She was the CEO of Nasty Gal, an online fashion retailer that she’d started in 2006 as a shoplifting anarchist who sold thrift-store clothes out of her San Francisco apartment.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Do you believe there was a nexus of Russian state-sponsored activity in London during the 2016 presidential election and Brexit campaigns? Yes. Was there communication between Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks? Yes. I finally saw glimmers of understanding coming into the committee members’ eyes. Facebook is no longer just a company, I told them. It’s a doorway into the minds of the American people, and Mark Zuckerberg left that door wide open for Cambridge Analytica, the Russians, and who knows how many others. Facebook is a monopoly, but its behavior is more than a regulatory issue—it’s a threat to national security. The concentration of power that Facebook enjoys is a danger to American democracy. Dancing a delicate ballet among multiple jurisdictions, intelligence agencies, legislative hearings, and police authorities, I have given more than two hundred hours of sworn testimony and handed over at least ten thousand pages of documents.

Mark D’Arcy, the BBC’s parliamentary correspondent covering the hearing, said, “I think the [DCMS committee] hearing with Chris Wylie is, by a distance, the most astounding thing I’ve seen in Parliament.” In Washington, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched investigations, while lawmakers in the United States and the U.K. began calling for Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to testify under oath. The Department of Justice and the FBI flew to Britain to meet me in person on a Royal Navy base a few weeks after the story broke. The NCA had borrowed the building from the Royal Navy. As Facebook’s stock slid, Zuckerberg remained out of sight. He finally emerged on March 21, with a Facebook post saying he was “working to understand exactly what happened” and saying there had been a “breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.”

The hashtag #DeleteFacebook started trending on Twitter, with Elon Musk stoking the fire by tweeting that he’d deleted the Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla. As I prepared for my public testimonies, I listened to Cardi B, the American rapper who had released her debut album only a few weeks after the story broke. The record’s (purely coincidental) title, Invasion of Privacy, quickly prompted memes to circulate on social media with Mark Zuckerberg’s face appended to an edited version of the now-platinum album’s cover. It began to look as if the story was tipping into the zeitgeist, and people who had already been feeling uneasy about how Facebook operates were now having their fears confirmed in the most public fashion. In the throes of this PR nightmare, Zuckerberg bought ad space in major newspapers to publish a letter of apology, only a couple of weeks after Facebook first threatened to sue The Guardian in an attempt to shut down the story, but the letter did little to quell the anger.


pages: 331 words: 96,989

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam L. Alter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, death from overwork, drug harm reduction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Richard Thaler, Robert Durst, side project, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, three-martini lunch

VR has been around for decades, but it’s now on the cusp of going mainstream. In 2013, a VR company called Oculus VR raised $2.5 million on Kickstarter. Oculus VR was promoting a headset for video games called the Rift. Until recently, most people thought of VR as a tool for gaming, but that changed when Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion in 2014. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had big ideas for the Oculus Rift that went far beyond games. “This is just the start,” Zuckerberg said. “After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face—just by putting goggles in your home.”

But the biggest difference between the apps came on April 9, 2012, when Facebook acquired Instagram for one billion dollars. When Dorshorst read about the acquisition, he was convinced he was reading a headline from satirical newspaper The Onion. He had to double-check. Laura Polkus, a former designer at Hipstamatic, remembered, “We saw Mark [Zuckerberg]’s blog post, and it was like, “Wait, one billion? Like, a billion dollars? What does that mean for us? Does that mean Instagram won?” Hipstamatic and Instagram offered the same core features, so why did Hipstamatic falter while Instagram continues to grow? The answer lies in two critical decisions that Systrom and Krieger made before they released the app.

Users paid just six dollars to join the site—a number that Hong and Young chose because it matched the price of two beers in a bar in the Midwest. At its peak, the site was generating $4 million in revenue each year, of which 93 percent was profit. The overhead for their lean, unintentionally addictive start-up was incredibly low. Rumor had it that Hong and Young’s early success inspired Mark Zuckerberg to create FaceMash, the face-rating site that paved the way for Facebook. In 2008 the pair sold the site for $20 million to a Russian tycoon who specialized in online dating websites. When they designed Hot or Not, James Hong and Jim Young were smart to include the same feature that made Instagram so successful: an engine for social feedback.


pages: 303 words: 100,516

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

A successful real estate mogul might convince investors that his company was worth five times its revenue, while tech founders who promised exponential growth from the networks they were building could suddenly command valuations that were ten or even twenty times the amount of money they were bringing in. David Fincher’s film The Social Network, about Facebook’s rise, had offered an unflattering portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg while still feeding the notion that Silicon Valley cowboys were a new breed of celebrity—a billion was the new million. Adam had begun trying to work his way into that world. “He liked sitting at the big kids’ table,” Aber Whitcomb, one of the cofounders of MySpace, who made an early $100,000 investment in WeWork, said.

But as part of the deal, Adam engineered a change to WeWork’s charter with the help of Jen Berrent, WeWork’s new general counsel, that gave him ten votes for each share of the company he owned. The arrangement would give him roughly 65 percent of the votes on any company matter. These “supervoting” shares had become popular in Silicon Valley, where founders feared losing control of their companies. Mark Zuckerberg had negotiated a similar deal, as had Travis Kalanick at Uber. Many investors were so eager to get in on the small group of start-ups that could make plausible arguments for world domination that they often believed they had no choice but to accept such founder-friendly terms. But giving so much control of a company to an entrepreneur who had never run a business of this size before was a risk.

After a few months, Gomel was moved out of his job managing WeWork’s core office-leasing business and tasked with WeWork’s tangential push into real estate investing. Shifting fortunes were a familiar pattern for WeWork executives. Gomel had taken his initial title from Artie Minson, who had been Adam’s heir apparent during two years as the metaphorical adult in the room—the Sheryl Sandberg to Adam’s Mark Zuckerberg. Minson was a foot shorter than Adam and had followed a more traditional path to the upper echelons of American business: private high school in New York, an accounting degree from Georgetown, then an MBA at Columbia. He had worked for founders before, and in each case, the brazen impulses that led them to start their companies in the first place had tempered as they grew into large corporations.


pages: 239 words: 70,206

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

Not incidentally, the instructor was Paul Bamberg, a cofounder of Dragon Systems, a commercial pioneer in speech recognition software. The programming involved tasks like implementing a fast Fourier transform algorithm, which converts time or space to frequency, and vice versa. The seminar was for students with serious math muscles, and there were only five students in the class. One of them was Mark Zuckerberg, who would found Facebook a year later. But the two did not get to know each other at Harvard. “Zuck was socially awkward then, so we didn’t talk much,” Hammerbacher recalls. Socially awkward is not a phrase anyone uses to describe Hammerbacher. Rude at times, certainly. He misses meals and meetings.

The Facebook years were Hammerbacher’s formative years as a data scientist, the source of his financial freedom, and, to some degree, his professional reputation as “the guy who built the data team at Facebook,” even though he left more than six years ago. When he showed up at Facebook in early 2006, Hammerbacher was twenty-three, older than most. Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive, was twenty-one. Zuckerberg, along with two early Facebook employees, Charlie Cheever and Dave Fetterman, were all acquaintances from Harvard. Another person Hammerbacher talked to before he signed on was Jeff Rothschild, who was fifty at the time. Rothschild had been sent over from the venture capital firm Accel Partners, a major investor in Facebook, to provide the proverbial adult supervision that so many start-ups require, and he stayed.

Hammerbacher’s boss was Adam D’Angelo, the chief technology officer at Facebook. A young computer whiz, D’Angelo had excelled in national and international programming contests in high school and college, attending the California Institute of Technology. At Facebook he had the added advantage of knowing Mark Zuckerberg since high school, at Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite prep school. Hammerbacher urged D’Angelo to make the investment to build up a data analysis team and create the computing engine for the job. At the time, Facebook was moving beyond its origins as a service for university students. In September 2006, it opened up to anyone thirteen years old or older with a valid e-mail address.


pages: 287 words: 69,655

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, Airbnb, cognitive bias, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, digital map, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Magic , global pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Sam Altman, science of happiness, selection bias, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systematic bias, Tony Fadell, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, Y Combinator

But then there are some people whose life story goes against this commonsense idea. Some extremely young people achieve enormous business success—say, Mark Zuckerberg. Because these people’s life stories go against common sense, they make for great stories—“Who would think that a nineteen-year-old could create a multibillion-dollar business?” People love telling the surprising stories—or making movies about them. Aaron Sorkin wrote The Social Network about nineteen-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and not The Thermostat about forty-one-year-old Tony Fadell. So many people hear so many of these initially surprising stories.

In fact, the new data busts some myths about entrepreneurs. Myth: The Advantage of Youth Think of a successful founder of a business. Who is the first person who comes to mind? Unless you have spent the past few minutes Googling around for how to create a Tony Fadell poster, it is probably someone like Steve Jobs. Or Bill Gates. Or Mark Zuckerberg. One feature these world-famous founders all have in common is the stage of life at which they founded their business empires. They were all young. Jobs started Apple when he was twenty-one years old. Gates began Microsoft at nineteen. Zuckerberg created Facebook at the age of nineteen. It is not a coincidence that so many young people come to mind when we think of successful entrepreneurs.


pages: 370 words: 107,983

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Moving towards this new way of using algorithms first requires an understanding of them, the simplifying way they see us all, and how we can all act to change their minds. 2 Doctor Illuminatus The problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically. MARK ZUCKERBERG, CEO of Facebook, 20161 Mark Zuckerberg was discussing the difficulty of distinguishing truth from misinformation. He is right on both counts, and I don’t envy him being faced with the challenges of ‘fake news’, and getting algorithms to determine what is ‘true’ and ‘false’ in the millions of shares, statuses, comments, photos and videos posted per minute on Facebook.

One theory is that personal computers were essentially gaming systems and marketed specifically to men, but a more likely explanation may be that once the role shifted from relative obscurity to a high-profile, highly paid career, then entrenched social bias deemed the role better suited to (mainly white) men, fostering a ‘brogrammer’ culture, with alienating fringe elements like the ‘manosphere’, which has probably played a substantial role in moving women out of the field, and implicitly shifting perceptions towards computer science being something women shouldn’t (and perhaps can’t) do. Computer scientists like Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are now not only enormously rich, but world famous. They have a position in society that far exceeds that of Edwards, Wollstonecraft, Lovelace or Taylor-Mill, and there are no contemporary female equivalents to them. In opening a 2005 debate on the issue of the relative abilities of men and women in science, then Harvard University President (and former Treasury Secretary under US President Clinton) Larry Summers made comments that were interpreted as endorsing the idea that women may be innately inferior to men in that regard, prompting widespread outrage and condemnation.12 However, far more interesting was the content of the actual debate, which pitted two Harvard psychologists against one another.

Turner’s site even boasts of how optimizing algorithms generate ad placement ‘in the style of CNN editorial content, with the ability to be placed directly in editorial streams of content and alongside relevant CNN editorial videos and articles’.3 Some are concerned that this has created a whole genre of ‘fake news’. While Wikipedia defines ‘fake news’ as a synonym for news satire, more recently it has become at worst a condemnation of real human journalism, and at best an umbrella term for the uncontrolled explosion of misleading information dispersed on social media. Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to make Facebook impede fake news. But it’s unclear how, as in the past his company has eliminated human editors and curators in favour of algorithms, ironically to ensure less bias in their presentation of news. As we’ve seen before, being able to determine what is true and what is fake is not a goal that algorithms can achieve easily.


pages: 344 words: 104,522

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

According to British corporate historians Leonardo Davoudi, Christopher McKenna, and Rowena Olegario chartered companies in the Old World waged wars with their own private armies and fleets, built forts and infrastructure, conquered territories, negotiated treaties, and, in the case of the Dutch East India Company, even minted their own corporate currency.4 I heard echoes of the Dutch East India Company’s voice in Mark Zuckerberg’s statement in 2020 that he wanted Facebook to launch its own cryptocurrency. At the same time, the Dutch East India Company also pursued philanthropic causes back at home, like donating funds to relieve poverty, build hospitals, and establish schools. And they were assiduous about noting those charitable activities in the company minutes.

In a live TV interview with Tucker Carlson, Bobulinski presented text messages that appeared to refer to Joe Biden as the “Chairman” and suggested that he often weighed in on business transactions.14 When asked to comment on the New York Post story, the Biden campaign declined to deny the accuracy of the story. The Biden campaign and family also didn’t dispute Tony Bobulinski’s allegations. Whether or not the story was actually true is a separate question. I certainly don’t know. Neither does Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey. It is noteworthy that after Biden had won the election, the news quietly came out that the DOJ had been investigating Hunter Biden.15 Regardless, factual disputes like these are a feature of modern politics. The general public weighs different pieces of information from various sources, listens to the candidates, and then makes an electoral decision.

During Senate testimony in response to a probe surrounding these issues, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey feigned humility, effectively saying “we screwed up” with respect to the company’s handling of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story. Dorsey claimed that blocking the article was in accordance with Twitter’s policies with respect to materials obtained through hacking while expressing contrition for making a hasty decision without sufficient evidence.16 Mark Zuckerberg was similarly self-critical. But don’t be fooled by their practiced vulnerability. Was it merely a coincidence that Facebook and Twitter adopted the exact same policies with the exact same political effect at the exact same time? Nope. This wasn’t a case of two bumbling gentle giants that simply couldn’t get out of their own way.


pages: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Rosenstein believed that his new employer not only was as relentlessly technical as his former one but was embarked on its own audacious quest, one that threatened to eclipse Google’s. Facebook was at the vanguard of social networking, a movement with the goal of organizing people through the network of personal connections they collected throughout their lives. Barely three years after its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had begun the company in a Harvard dorm room, Facebook was signing up millions of users and was on a trajectory to sign up most of the literate world. The same month Rosenstein wrote his letter, Facebook launched a new strategy that allowed software developers to write applications inside its website, almost as if the site were its own little Internet.

(Facebook would eventually allow its user profile pages to be exposed on Google.) Facebook was a scary competitor because in some ways it was very much like Google. True, Facebook wasn’t built on a brilliant scientific advance as Google was, and there was no technical innovation at Facebook even close to the breathtaking Google infrastructure. But Mark Zuckerberg was in the Larry Page mold, a wildly ambitious leader with a quasi-religious trust in engineering. Zuckerberg said that Facebook would have hacker values. Ten years younger than Page and Brin—a generation in Internet time—Zuckerberg respected Google’s values but believed that the older company had lost its nimbleness and focus.

One of the hottest was called Foursquare. Its cofounder was Dennis Crowley. Google had a built-in disadvantage in the social networking sweepstakes. It was happy to gather information about the intricate web of personal and professional connections known as the “social graph” (a term favored by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) and integrate that data as signals in its search engine. But the basic premise of social networking—that a personal recommendation from a friend was more valuable than all of human wisdom, as represented by Google Search—was viewed with horror at Google. Page and Brin had started Google on the premise that the algorithm would provide the only answer.


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Despite the achievements of such heroic creators as John D. Rockefeller, J. J. Hill, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, George Eastman, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, A. P. Giannini, Estée Lauder, Charles Merrill, Chester Carlson, Bill Gates, Ray Kroc, Norman Borlaug, Michael Milken, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and so many others, commerce is perceived as a somewhat-grubby, less-than-exalted undertaking. It is portrayed as something of a Faustian bargain: businesspeople succeed by appealing to our baser instincts; they are motivated by greed and too often may bend the rules.

America’s entrepreneurs live in a world with four billion poor people. Why on a planet riven with famine, poverty, and disease, it is plausibly asked, should this tiny minority be allowed to control riches thousands of times greater than their needs for subsistence and comfort? More specifically, why should Mark Zuckerberg, the proprietor of Facebook, be estimated to command a fortune worth some $17 billion, while Suzie Saintly, the social worker, makes a mere $40,000 a year, almost half a million times less? Or why should Bill Gates, Microsoft founder, be worth over $50 billion while Dan Bricklin, the inventor of the pioneering VisiCalc spreadsheet that launched the personal computer into business applications, be reduced to tilling his tiny consultancy “Software Garden” with a handful of colleagues?

It is embodied in a vast web of enterprise that retains its worth only through constant work and sacrifice. Nevertheless, even dismissing the charge that the “one percent of the one percent” engage in a carnival of greed, we do not explain, or justify, their huge wealth. Some apologists will say that Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook billions were a reward for his brilliant entrepreneurship and software coding, while penury is the just outcome of alcoholism and improvidence. But Suzy Saintly, Barack Obama, and Dan Bricklin are neither improvident nor necessarily less brilliant than Mark. All these arguments are beside the point.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

It’s not until the monster has killed the doctor’s brother, his best friend, and his wife that Victor resolves to do anything meaningful about it—even if it is to fruitlessly pursue the monster until he dies, unable to correct its behavior. It’s uncanny: Dr. Frankenstein could be Richard Arkwright, or Mark Zuckerberg, or William Horsfall, or Travis Kalanick. The warnings, just as acute and insightful now, continue to go unheeded. “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge,” Dr. Frankenstein says, “and how much happier the man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

These certain people, whom Yang calls “my friends in Silicon Valley,” are the entrepreneurs who have disrupted key elements of the economy, accumulating unprecedented levels of wealth and power in the process. The names will be familiar: Bezos, the modern Arkwright, and Uber’s Travis Kalanick, a Horsfall, but also Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. But these men—just like two hundred years ago, they are almost all men—have power on a scale that a nineteenth-century titan could not even begin to dream of. The tech giants have dramatically transformed and squeezed countless livelihoods—not just taxi drivers and delivery workers, but small-business owners who depend on their company’s placement in Google search results, or getting a fair deal on Amazon’s third-party vendor marketplace.

Because they’ve made it easy,” the Washington Post mused in 2019. Beyond a matter of optics, their influence over politics is increasingly considered malign, and that includes the tech billionaires—once the twenty-first century’s most revered businessmen. Polls conducted in 2021 show that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is deeply unpopular, and more people dislike Amazon founder Jeff Bezos than like him. The scorn is increasingly bipartisan; while liberals take them to task for amassing monopoly power and for the poor labor conditions at their companies, conservatives accuse them of political bias and censorship.


pages: 278 words: 74,880

A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Carbon Emissions by Muhammad Yunus

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", active measures, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, data science, distributed generation, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Silicon Valley, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban sprawl, young professional

“Retail Florist License,” Louisiana Horticulture Commission, http://www.ldaf.state.la.us/consumers/horticulture-programs/louisiana-horticulture-commission/. 3. The Giving Pledge, https://givingpledge.org. 4. Kerry A. Dolan, “Mark Zuckerberg Announces Birth of Baby Girl & Plan to Donate 99% of His Facebook Stock,” Forbes, December 1, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2015/12/01/mark-zuckerberg-announces-birth-of-baby-girl-plan-to-donate-99-of-his-facebook-stock/#16d43dc218f5. 5. Muhammad A. Yunus and Judith Rodin, “Save the World, Turn a Profit,” Bloomberg View, September 25, 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015–09–25/save-the-world-turn-a-profit.

All eight of have signed the Giving Pledge, by which they promise to give away half of their wealth for charity after their death. These eight people are among the many billionaires around the world who have signed the Giving Pledge. (As of mid-2016, the number had surpassed 150, with more signatories continuing to join the list.)3 One of the eight wealthiest billionaires is Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook. In 2015, when his first child, a daughter named Max, was born, Zuckerberg issued a public statement announcing plans to make a charitable donation of 99 percent of his Facebook shares—the vast bulk of his personal wealth. The statement was accompanied by a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission making the gift official.


pages: 294 words: 77,356

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

. $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. Garza, Alicia. “A Herstory of the #Blacklivesmatter Movement.” http://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/. [Accessed June 28, 2017.] Gillespie, Sarah. “Mark Zuckerberg Supports Universal Basic Income. What Is It?” CNN Money, May 26, 2017. http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/26/news/economy/mark-zuckerberg-universal-basic-income/index.html. [Accessed June 28, 2017.] Hiltzik, Michael. “Conservatives, Liberals, Techies, and Social Activists All Love Universal Basic Income: Has Its Time Come?” Los Angeles Times, June 22, 2017. http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-ubi-20170625-story.html.

“We need a program that can provide a temporary cash cushion,” they write, “because no matter what strategies we implement, work … will sometimes fail.”4 In the face of fears that automation promises a jobless future, a cash assistance plan, the universal basic income (UBI) is enjoying a resurgence. Experiments in UBI are currently being conducted in Finland and in Ontario, Canada. In May 2017, Hawaii adopted a bill declaring that “all families … deserve basic financial security” and began to explore instituting a UBI. High-tech entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, believe that a UBI will provide a cushion allowing everyone to innovate and try new ideas. UBI plans usually offer between $8,000 and $12,000 a year. In principle, a UBI would be truly universal—offered to every citizen—but in political practice, guaranteed adequate income programs tend to be offered to those who are unemployed or who fall below a minimum income line.


pages: 254 words: 79,052

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation by Chris Nodder

4chan, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, drop ship, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, game design, gamification, haute couture, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, late fees, lolcat, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, Netflix Prize, Nick Leeson, Occupy movement, Paradox of Choice, pets.com, price anchoring, recommendation engine, Rory Sutherland, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile

They probably visit the ISP’s site rarely, if ever. However, it seems that people are just as lax when it comes to the products they use every day. Facebook launched in 2004 with the concept that only your friends get access to the personal information you post. Over the years, this philosophy has changed, with Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, claiming in a 2010 interview that the new social norm is openness, not privacy. “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are. … [We asked ourselves] what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

Although 71 percent of 18–29-year-old social network users say they’ve changed privacy settings, only 55 percent aged 50–64 have moved from the defaults. Only 44 percent of young adult Internet users say they’ve taken steps to limit how much personal information is available about them online, and that figure reduces to 25 percent of users who are aged 50–64. In Facebook’s defense, getting privacy right is hard. As Mark Zuckerberg says, “The paradox is that people share their phone number in the telephone book but want to keep it private online.” The interesting disingenuity in that statement is that there’s a difference between public information and publicized information. Marketers must know either someone’s name or their address to retrieve their phone number from the book, but on Facebook they get name, address, friends list, phone number, photos, Likes, and many other pieces of information delivered to them all wrapped up with a neat little bow.

“Key Lawmakers Question Local Provider Over Use of NebuAd Software Without Directly Notifying Customers” (markey.house.gov). July 15, 2008. Retrieved December 2012. Embarq’s two responses: Letter from David W. Zesiger, SVP Regulatory Policy & External Affairs, Embarq, July 21, 2008; and letter from Tom Gerke, president and CEO, Embarq, July 23, 2008, to the Committee on Energy and Commerce. Facebook privacy: Mark Zuckerberg interview with Michael Arrington at the 2010 “Crunchie” awards, San Francisco. Privacy setting stats: Mary Madden and Aaron Smith. Reputation Management and Social Media. Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2010. Negative options: Don’t not sign up! E-mail opt-in rates: Steven Bellman, Eric J.


pages: 296 words: 78,631

Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry

23andMe, 3D printing, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, chief data officer, computer vision, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Chrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, ransomware, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, systematic bias, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, trolley problem, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, William Langewiesche, you are the product

Just ask the residents of Scunthorpe in the north of England, who were blocked from opening AOL accounts after the internet giant created a new profanity filter that objected to the name of their town.3 Or Chukwuemeka Afigbo, the Nigerian man who discovered an automatic hand-soap dispenser that released soap perfectly whenever his white friend placed their hand under the machine, but refused to acknowledge his darker skin.4 Or Mark Zuckerberg, who, when writing the code for Facebook in his dorm room in Harvard in 2004, would never have imagined his creation would go on to be accused of helping manipulate votes in elections around the globe.5 Behind each of these inventions is an algorithm. The invisible pieces of code that form the gears and cogs of the modern machine age, algorithms have given the world everything from social media feeds to search engines, satellite navigation to music recommendation systems, and are as much a part of our modern infrastructure as bridges, buildings and factories ever were.

In those examples, the human judgement made far better predictions, outperforming anything the algorithm could manage – suggesting there are some things so intrinsically human that data and mathematical formulae will always struggle to describe them. Data BACK IN 2004, SOON AFTER college student Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, he had an instant messenger exchange with a friend: ZUCK: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard ZUCK: Just ask. ZUCK: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses . . . [REDACTED FRIEND’S NAME]: What? How’d you manage that one? ZUCK: People just submitted it.

Ten scenes from life in calculated publics’, Science, Technology and Human Values, vol. 41, no. 1, 2016, pp. 77–92. 3. Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph, 9 April 1996. 4. Chukwuemeka Afigbo (@nke_ise) posted a short video of this effect on Twitter. Worth looking up if you haven’t seen it. It’s also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87QwWpzVy7I. 5. CNN interview, Mark Zuckerberg: ‘I’m really sorry that this happened’, YouTube, 21 March 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6DOhioBfyY. Power 1. From a private conversation with the chess grandmaster Jonathan Rowson. 2. Feng-Hsiung Hsu, ‘IBM’s Deep Blue Chess grandmaster chips’, IEEE Micro, vol. 19, no. 2, 1999, pp. 70–81, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/755469/. 3.


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Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, big-box store, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, call centre, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital nomad, drop ship, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, follow your passion, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, growth hacking, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, index fund, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, passive investing, Paul Graham, pets.com, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, software as a service, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, uber lyft, web application, William MacAskill, Y Combinator, Y2K

But setting these almost outrageous goals and expectations was not enough; they had to be accompanied by the confidence that they could be achieved. Gandhi did this through countless examples of peaceful protest, and Machida did it by convincing his engineering team that they could achieve this goal and that he trusted them to do so, and by giving them the resources to realize it. Because Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, is a classic introverted leader, he enlists the help of COO Sheryl Sandberg, who offers him social and political guidance. Mark leans on smaller, genuine, collaborative connections rather than attempting to keep a large number of employees or subordinates under his rule.

By focusing on customer success and happiness, Peldi avoids the dangers of “thinking big” or pushing aside profit in the hope that one day margins will be huge. Even business moguls like Richard Branson started small: the entire Virgin brand began with a single magazine called Student. Google began as a research project at Stanford. Facebook was targeted only at Harvard undergraduates when Mark Zuckerberg started it. For Peldi and his team at Balsamiq, focusing on better, not bigger, removes any pressure to take shortcuts in software development. He gets to spend his time talking to customers instead of in board meetings or at investor pitches. Moreover, Peldi says, “I’m Italian. Italians measure things in generations, not quarters.”

Next, customers need to admire your “whole person”—not just how you act when you’re trying to sell them something. What charities do you support? How do you act outside of work? With everyone sharing everything on social media, your entire life is available to anyone with access to Google. CEOs are sharing the news when their own babies are born (like Mark Zuckerberg or Marissa Mayer). Tim Cook, an incredibly private man, shared an essay about being gay and campaigns against anti-transgender laws. Customers admire businesses that feel and act similarly to them. Admiration develops when you do this well, and once you have their admiration, customers develop an interest in your success and accomplishments instead of a sense of resentment or jealousy.


pages: 253 words: 75,772

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

air gap, airport security, anti-communist, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, Edward Snowden, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Rubik’s Cube, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Ted Kaczynski, WikiLeaks

It is breaking the law.” This was a rather odd line of defense: in effect, it told the rest of the world that the NSA does assault the privacy of non-Americans. Privacy protections, apparently, are only for American citizens. This message prompted such international outrage that even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, not exactly known for his vehement defense of privacy, complained that the US government “blew it” in its response to the NSA scandal by jeopardizing the interests of international Internet companies: “The government said don’t worry, we’re not spying on any Americans. Wonderful, that’s really helpful for companies trying to work with people around the world.

When Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked in a 2009 CNBC interview about concerns over his company’s retention of user data, he infamously replied: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” With equal dismissiveness, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a 2010 interview that “people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.” Privacy in the digital age is no longer a “social norm,” he claimed, a notion that handily serves the interests of a tech company trading on personal information.

Google insisted on a policy of not talking to reporters from CNET, the technology news site, after CNET published Eric Schmidt’s personal details—including his salary, campaign donations, and address, all public information obtained via Google—in order to highlight the invasive dangers of his company. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg purchased the four homes adjacent to his own in Palo Alto, at a cost of $30 million, to ensure his privacy. As CNET put it, “Your personal life is now known as Facebook’s data. Its CEO’s personal life is now known as mind your own business.” The same contradiction is expressed by the many ordinary citizens who dismiss the value of privacy yet nonetheless have passwords on their email and social media accounts.


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Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Big Tech, bitcoin, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, commons-based peer production, context collapse, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, death of newspapers, Debian, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Ethereum, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Induced demand, informal economy, information security, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, leftpad, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, node package manager, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, pull request, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ruby on Rails, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, urban planning, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, Zimmermann PGP

CONCLUSION 341 Kara Swisher, “A Wise Man Leaves Facebook,” The New York Times, September 27, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/opinion/facebook-instagram-systrom.html. 342 Ian Sullivan, “Re: Things That Happened in November,” email to author, December 20, 2018. 343 Nadia Eghbal, “The Developer’s Dilemma,” Nadia Eghbal, February 8, 2018, https://nadiaeghbal.com/developers-dilemma. 344 Shauna Gordon-McKeon, No Subject, email to author, March 22, 2019. 345 Ben Thompson, “Faceless Publishers,” Stratechery, May 31, 2017, https://stratechery.com/2017/the-faceless-publisher/. 346 Eugene Wei, “Status as a Service (StaaS),” Remains of the Day, February 19, 2019, https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service. 347 Yancey Strickler, “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” OneZero, May 20, 2019, https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1. 348 Nick Statt, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Says the ‘Future Is Private,’” The Verge, April 30, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18524188/facebook-f8-keynote-mark-zuckerberg-privacy-future-2019. 349 Sarah Perez, “Twitter Launches Its Controversial ‘Hide Replies’ Feature in the US and Japan,” TechCrunch, September 19, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/twitter-launches-its-controversial-hide-replies-feature-in-the-u-s-and-japan/.

Yancey Strickler, who cofounded Kickstarter, calls this the “dark forest theory” of the internet: “an increasing number of the population has scurried into their dark forests” to avoid the mainstream web, which has become “a relentless competition for power.”347 He points to newsletters, podcasts, and group chats as examples of dark forests, while Facebook and Twitter are examples of the mainstream, which will continue to exist alongside more private channels. Mark Zuckerberg himself declared to a crowd at Facebook’s 2019 F8 conference that “the future is private,” insisting, “Over time, I believe that a private social platform will be even more important to our lives than our digital town squares.”348 The public stage increasingly reflects a one-way mirror pattern, where anybody can consume content but interactions with its creator are limited.


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Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

But in the span of little more than a decade since I wrote Silicon Dragon,1 which was the first chronicle of China’s emerging Silicon Valley, the world’s second-largest economy and its expanding tech empire can no longer be underestimated. Today, young people in China looking for role models think of Robin Li, Jack Ma, and Pony Ma (founders of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, respectively) more than they do Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, or Steve Jobs of Apple. High-tech China is inventing the next new thing at a rapid clip in frontier technologies: artificial intelligence, biotech, green energy, robotics, and superfast mobile communications. China also is angling to get ahead in fifth-generation wireless standards, which is being compared in impact to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press.2 Large sweeps of the Chinese economy—transportation, commerce, finance, health care, entertainment, and communications—are being reimagined and reshaped by China’s assertive effort to forge ahead by leveraging technology.

The tech universe of the future will be regional innovation powerhouses moving in parallel with neither dominating worldwide. One thing US tech leaders can’t do much about is the uneven playing field—American companies can’t get beyond the Great Firewall of China’s internet censorship and reach Chinese consumers directly. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg meets with Chinese leaders, jogs in front of the Forbidden City, and is learning Mandarin, but Facebook remains off-limits in China. Blocks remain on Google, Twitter, and Instagram too—though Google has been making plans to reenter China with its controversial Project Dragon, a censored search app for China, in the face of White House pressure to scrap it.

Tencent’s CEO, a press-shy engineer born and educated in southern China, has been described as a scorpion who will lie in wait before attacking, has a $44 billion fortune.2 His QQ instant messaging service was based on the Israeli invention ICQ, initially acquired by AOL and then bought by Russia’s largest internet company, Mail.Ru. Today, China’s titans have left copying behind and are managing broad and deep power bases in tech. With that power comes lots of headaches. Like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Page, who confront a tech backlash and constant challenges to their clout, China’s leaders face daunting issues that could weaken them: privacy concerns, counterfeit charges, restrictions on their most addictive products, and competitive threats. Baidu faces a possible reentry of Google to the Middle Kingdom some 10 years after googling didn’t knock out China’s search leader.


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12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Life expectancy was around 30 years for the slum-housed factory workers. So much money. So little equality. Folks called Manchester the Golden Sewer. * * * Marx, writing in chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, had this to say, and it sounds eerily like the 21st-century ‘move fast and break things’ (Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook) mentality we associate with Big Tech: Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones … All that is solid melts into air. For Marx, on the ground at the time, technological progress was the guarantee of social revolution, because progress was being driven without any regard for the human cost of the soaring profits.

Usually a dystopia for the hero and friends, and a utopia to those who benefit from or accept the situation. I suspect that the future will not be so binary. As Arthur C. Clarke put it in 1964 – ‘The future will not be merely an extension of the present.’ What’s for sure is that ‘privacy is an anachronism’ (thank you, Mark Zuckerberg). Like every other system in the coming world, I too will always be on, always be known, always be available, even while I sleep, dream, or think about things. My ‘own’ self will not be owned by me. My own self and my known self will become the same data set. Soon the interface between me and mini-me – my Google self and myself – will be redundant.

While there is no consensus on the future, there is consensus that total connectivity will happen – to the internet, to our devices, to our machines, to each other. When you customise your connectivity it will feel like yours. Actually, it will feel like you. And you will feel as if you have chosen it. An avatar Sinatra singing I did it My-Wi. And a whole new questioning of what is ‘you’ comes bubbling up. My-wi is religious in its own way. Mark Zuckerberg has talked about Facebook as a ‘global church’, connecting people to something bigger than themselves. It may be bigger – it may be smaller – but it will be connected. Here’s George Orwell in his novel 1984: You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.


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The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

elite labor income: Saez, “Reported Incomes and Marginal Tax Rates,” 158, Figure 8 (calculation from the figure, following the practice noted earlier of treating 70 percent of profits from S-corporations, partnerships, and sole proprietorships as labor income). an open letter: Mark Zuckerberg, “A Letter to Our Daughter,” Facebook, December 1, 2015, www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-letter-to-our-daughter/10153375081581634/. When Zuckerberg wrote the letter, he was the sixth-richest person in the world. Kerry A. Dolan and Luisa Kroll, “Forbes 2016 World’s Billionaires: Meet the Richest People on the Planet,” Forbes, March 1, 2016, www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2016/03/01/forbes-2016-worlds-billionaires-meet-the-richest-people-on-the-planet/#5d8c660277dc.

The working rich have risen by fundamentally transforming class conflict and then winning the new battle between elite and middle-class labor. The claim that meritocratic inequality reflects earned advantage may ultimately be a moral error. But it rests on economic facts. A CULTURE OF INDUSTRY Shortly after his first child was born, Mark Zuckerberg—whose labor income from creating Facebook (paid to him in founder’s shares) has created the fifth-largest fortune in the world—wrote his new daughter an open letter. The letter, expounding on the hopes of the meritocratic elite, admired human creativity and innovation, lamented inequality, and pledged to donate 99 percent of Zuckerberg’s Facebook fortune to “advance human potential and promote equality for all children in the next generation.”

This is why total education expenditure today grows more rapidly with rising income than does expenditure on any other major category of consumption, and why inequality in expenditures on education has in recent decades increased more rapidly even than income inequality. Indeed, meritocracy’s imaginative hold over today’s elite is so powerful that even the super-rich—who own enough physical and financial capital to secure dynastic succession through traditional bequests—nevertheless commonly give their children a meritocratic inheritance, often (as in Mark Zuckerberg’s case) as their principal or exclusive bequest. The economic and social transformation from a society led by a hereditary leisured elite to a society led by the working rich rationalizes these practices. The meritocratic inheritance—the immense excess investments that rich parents make in their children’s human capital, over and above what middle-class children receive—dominates dynastic succession in a meritocratic world.


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

Scores of private jets swarmed into Davos for the event, which included a dissection of such matters as whether a carbon tax would be better than a capand-trade system at saving the planet. The Google Guys flew in on their 767 and then sparked nonstop gossip at the conference about who would get to fly back with them to Silicon Valley. (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was among the lucky who were chosen.) NetJets Europe, the continent’s largest private jet operator, booked no fewer than fifty flights to Davos to handle all of the demand for the conference. These flights were a small fraction of the sixty-five thousand private trips the company operated in Europe in 2006—the equivalent to a plane taking off or landing every eight minutes.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon was born in 1964. The eBay billionaires Jeff Skoll and Pierre Omidyar were born in 1965 and 1967, respectively. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were both born in 1973. Marc Andreessen made a fortune on Netscape in the 1990s and would seem to be a senior statesman in Silicon Valley; he was born in 1971. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who could well emerge as one of the richest technologists of the twenty-first century, was born in 1984. Political scientists have long noted that civic participation rises with age. Young people have the lowest rates of voting and volunteerism; the retired have the highest. Young adults are often too caught up in early life challenges to think much about influencing the broader world, while people at the height of very busy careers may not have time to do much beyond vote.

Dobbs Ferry draws a lot of two-income professional couples, people such as Edward and Karen Zuckerberg, both in the medical field. (Edward is a dentist in town.) The couple has gotten a lot of attention lately because their son, Mark, who was born and raised in Dobbs Ferry, started Facebook. Mark went to public schools in the area before spending his senior year at Phillips Andover Academy and then going to Harvard. Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t given many hints as to his politics, but his basic stats—professional parents, blue-state upbringing, elite T 269 both.indd 269 5/11/10 6:27:54 AM 270 fortunes of change education, years spent in the Bay Area—all point to probable liberal leanings. Zuckerberg is still very young—he was born in 1984—and given how busy he’s been with work, he may not even have wellformed political beliefs.


pages: 424 words: 114,905

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

Many experts take the opposite point of view, including Alan Bundy of the University of Edinburgh74 or Yann LeCun (“there would be no Ex Machina or Terminator scenarios, because robots would not be built with human drives—hunger, power, reproduction, self-preservation”).75 Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, LeCun’s employer, Mark Zuckerberg, isn’t worried either, writing on Facebook, “Some people fear-monger about how A.I. is a huge danger, but that seems far-fetched to me and much less likely than disasters due to widespread disease, violence, etc.”76 Some AI experts have even dramatically changed their views, like Stuart Russell of UC Berkeley.77 There’s no shortage of futurologists weighing in, one way or another, or even both ways, and even taking each other on.78 I especially got a kick out of the AI and Mars connection, setting up disparate views between Andrew Ng and Elon Musk.

Texts from the very popular Chinese platform Weibo were analyzed with machine learning with some word classifiers detected.41 At a much larger scale, Facebook is mining its wall posts of users who report risk of self-harm. After Facebook Live was rolled out in 2016, it has been used by several people to broadcast their suicide. With a heightened awareness of the opportunity to prevent such tragedies, in 2017, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new algorithms that look for patterns of posts and words for rapid review by dedicated Facebook employees: “In the future, AI will be able to understand more of the subtle nuances of language and will be able to identify different issues beyond suicide as well, including quickly spotting more kinds of bullying and hate.”

(Similar to voice recognition, deep neural networks are now mastering lip reading to help the deaf.)16 Nonetheless, there are clearly downsides that need to be underscored. Even though Alexa and the others have to be activated by the wake word—calling their name out—having a listening device in your home surely qualifies as creepy. It reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg putting tape over his laptop webcam, fearing that someone could be watching. You can shut down the “always-on” setting to alleviate some privacy concerns, but when the devices are activated, we know that the companies are taping some of the conversations to train and improve their platform, even though users have the ability to delete all the content (something that few people bother to do).


pages: 138 words: 43,748

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle by Jeff Flake

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, immigration reform, impulse control, invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Potemkin village, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

At issue was the “Trending Topics” feature of Facebook, which is supposed to be based on the volume of interest a given subject is achieving at a given time and determines how many people on Facebook will be exposed to the subject. A report on the tech website Gizmodo quoted a former Facebook “news curator” who said that conservative viewpoints were sometimes “black-listed,” which, if true, was a very disturbing allegation. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg denied the claim but, recognizing the seriousness of the issue, convened a roundtable in May 2016 with conservative media figures, including Glenn Beck, S. E. Cupp, Dana Perino, and Brent Bozell (Breitbart.com, then still run by Steve Bannon, was invited but declined to attend) to give assurances and seek solutions.

Vintage Books, 2014. Judis, John B. The Populist Explosion. Columbia Global Reports, 2016. ———. William F. Buckley: Patron Saint of the Conservatives. Simon & Schuster, 2001. Klososky, Scott, editor. The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994. Lien, Tracey. “Mark Zuckerberg Says Many Conservatives Don’t Trust Facebook to Show ‘Content Without a Political Bias’.” Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2016. Nunez, Michael. “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News.” Gizmodo, May 9, 2016. Orwell, George. Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays. Harcourt, Inc., 2008.


pages: 151 words: 39,757

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

4chan, Abraham Maslow, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, context collapse, corporate governance, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, Network effects, peak TV, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, theory of mind, WikiLeaks, you are the product, zero-sum game

Here’s Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook: We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.… It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.… The inventors, creators—it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously. And we did it anyway … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other.… It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.1 Here’s Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of user growth at Facebook: The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.… No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.

They send us money as we watch. The imbalanced power relationship is in your face all the time. Don’t you feel humiliated using one of the Facebook brands, like Instagram or WhatsApp? Facebook is the first public company controlled by one person.32 I mean, I don’t personally have anything against Mark Zuckerberg. It isn’t about him. But why would you subordinate a big part of your life to any one stranger? When I was growing up there were big politicians, rich people, pop stars, captains of industry, and all that, but none of them got to run my life in any substantial way. They influenced me now and then by saying something that caught my attention, but that was it.


pages: 159 words: 42,401

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

Barr, UK home secretary Priti Patel, acting US homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan, and Australian minister for home affairs Peter Dutton — had begun pressuring Facebook to create a back door in WhatsApp and its other messaging services that would allow law enforcement agencies to spy on users’ private communications. ‘‘Companies should not deliberately design their systems to preclude any form of access to content even for preventing or investigating the most serious crimes,’’ they wrote in a letter to Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook fired back. ‘‘End-to-end encryption already protects the messages of over a billion people every day,’’ Andy Stone, a company spokesman, told the New York Times. ‘‘We strongly oppose government attempts to build backdoors because they would undermine the privacy and security of people everywhere.’’

p. 138 snail mail: Scott Shane and Sarah Kliff, “A Scoop about Neil Armstrong Arrived in a Plain Brown Envelope,” New York Times, August 1, 2019. p. 139 NSA cracks VPNs: “NSA Broke into Secure Network of Al Jazeera and Others: Report,” Al Jazeera, August 16, 2018. p. 140 laptop cameras: Katie Rogers, “Mark Zuckerberg Covers His Laptop Camera. You Should Consider It, Too,” New York Times, June 22, 2016. p. 140 Little Snitch: “Little Snitch 4,” Objective Development, https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html. p. 140 cute stickers: Electronic Frontier Foundation, eff.org. p. 142 Mobile Justice: “ACLU Apps to Record Police Conduct,” Aclu.org.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

To make that more concrete, CEOs who are one decile higher in the distribution of these credentials earn about 5 percent higher pay, or about an extra $280,000 a year.11 Another factor is that, on average, top CEO talent helps larger firms proportionally more than smaller firms, and high salaries can be useful as a means of allocating the best talent to their most important uses. If Mark Zuckerberg had been running a midsized financial services company rather than Facebook, that would have been a waste of his talents, and likely Facebook would not have taken off as it did. A study found that when we take such “matching” factors into account, the optimal highest marginal tax rate on CEOs probably should be in the range of 27 to 34 percent.

OK, so Google looks pretty strong as an innovator. What about Facebook? Facebook has consistently upgraded the quality and diversity of its product since its inception. In 2006, Yahoo offered to buy out Facebook for $1 billion, and at the time many commentators thought this was a no-brainer offer for Mark Zuckerberg. Of course, he declined it and proceeded to invest further, making the company worth many times more than that—more than $50 billion as of 2017. Arguably Zuckerberg has done a better job allocating capital within his company than any other recent American CEO. Most of those increases in value have sprung from service and quality upgrades, innovations at the time they were instituted.

It remains to be seen how well they will succeed in this endeavor, but at the very least they are helping to drive this highly competitive race. Just to be up-front, I should note that, in my own personal life, I am not a fan of Facebook in the same way that I am a fan of Google. I consider it to be an amazing company and believe that Mark Zuckerberg has been one of the most impressive CEOs of our time. Still, I have two complaints. The first is mostly personal and subjective: I find their page confusing to look at and use, and their changes in page organization over time have confused me as well (too much innovation, from my point of view).


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

Corporate parent Alphabet is establishing well-funded AI centers across the globe. “I don’t buy into the killer robot [theory],” Google director of research Peter Norvig told CNBC. Another Google researcher, the psychologist and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, said, “I am in the camp that it is hopeless.” Mark Zuckerberg and several Facebook executives went so far as to stage an intervention for Musk, inviting him to dinner at Zuckerberg’s house so they could ply him with arguments that AI is okay. It didn’t work. Ever since, Musk and Zuckerberg have waged a social media feud on the topic. Asked about Musk, Zuckerberg told a Facebook Live audience, “I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios—I just, I don’t understand it.

BBC News, December 2, 2014. bbc.in/1vgH80r. Chown, Marcus. “Dying to Know: Would You Lay Your Life on the Line for a Theory?” New Scientist, December 20/27, 1997, 50–51. Clark, Nicola, and Dennis Overbye. “Scientist Suspected of Terrorist Ties.” New York Times, October 9, 2009. Clifford, Catherine. “Mark Zuckerberg Doubles Down Defending A.I. After Elon Musk Says His Understanding of It Is ‘Limited.’” CNBC, July 26, 2017. Coleman, Sidney, and Frank De Luccia. “Gravitational Effects on and of Vacuum Decay.” Physical Review D 21 (1980): 3305–3315. Collins, Daniel P. “William Eckhardt: The Man Who Launched 1,000 Systems.”

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, & Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Merali, Zeeya. “Quantum Physics: What Is Really Real?” Nature 521 (2015): 278–280. Metz, Cade. “Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the Feud over Killer Robots.” New York Times, June 9, 2018. Military History Now, uncredited. “The Men Who Saved the World—Meet Two Different Russians Who Prevented WW3.” 2013. bit.ly/1PbhTli. Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.


pages: 317 words: 84,400

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World by Christopher Steiner

23andMe, Ada Lovelace, airport security, Al Roth, algorithmic trading, Apollo 13, backtesting, Bear Stearns, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, dumpster diving, financial engineering, Flash crash, G4S, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, High speed trading, Howard Rheingold, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge economy, late fees, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, medical residency, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Sergey Aleynikov, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

When they reached college, often an elite university, they could already string together thousands of lines of code, create the guts of a stable application, or bolt up an original Web site design in a matter of hours. During the three months I spent there in the summer of 2011, I learned how Mark Zuckerbergs are created: not from spontaneous explosions of intellect and technology, but from years and years of staring at a computer screen, getting to know code as intuitively as a seasoned copy editor knows idioms, punctuation, and style. These stylists of code and writers of algorithms are the preeminent entrepreneurs of this generation.

There’s little doubt that the collapse of the financial industry changed the course of the economy. But just as with any great story, there are other branches of this tale. Wall Street’s nadir of 2008 and early 2009 may have been the main act onstage, but there were other, more subtle plays taking place. One wasn’t so subtle: Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in early 2004, and he was at the time of this writing worth more than $25 billion. His company’s value, meanwhile, has soared past $100 billion. Zuckerberg’s story is well known; the people who use Facebook aren’t tech nerds or finance guys—they’re exceedingly normal people, many of whom have become addicted to the constant updates, news, and chat that Facebook provides.

The gears of Bear’s quant operations, whose math and programming work had been manipulated into endorsing what, we now can see, was an insane volume of mortgage-backed securities, had turned Hammerbacher off. If he wasn’t going to pursue further learning within the structured setting of academia, he surely didn’t want to waste his time on this. Through a Harvard friend in the spring of 2006, Mark Zuckerberg reached out to Hammerbacher, who was well known for his math prowess. A week later, Hammerbacher was relocating to California. He was an early employee at Facebook—one of the first hundred—and Zuckerberg gave him the fancy title of research scientist. It was Hammerbacher’s job to use math and algorithms to figure out how people were using Facebook, broken down by age, gender, location, and income, and why Facebook thrived in some places and flopped in others.


pages: 308 words: 84,713

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

Through the statistical “discovery” of potential friends, the provision of “Like” buttons and other clickable tokens of affection, and the automated management of many of the time-consuming aspects of personal relations, they seek to streamline the messy process of affiliation. Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, celebrates all of this as “frictionless sharing”—the removal of conscious effort from socializing. But there’s something repugnant about applying the bureaucratic ideals of speed, productivity, and standardization to our relations with others. The most meaningful bonds aren’t forged through transactions in a marketplace or other routinized exchanges of data.

Many computer companies and software houses now say they’re working to make their products invisible. “I am super excited about technologies that disappear completely,” declares Jack Dorsey, a prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneur. “We’re doing this with Twitter, and we’re doing this with [the online credit-card processor] Square.”27 When Mark Zuckerberg calls Facebook “a utility,” as he frequently does, he’s signaling that he wants the social network to merge into our lives the way the telephone system and electric grid did.28 Apple has promoted the iPad as a device that “gets out of the way.” Picking up on the theme, Google markets Glass as a means of “getting technology out of the way.”

Facebook, through its Timeline and other documentary features, encourages its members to think of their public image as indistinguishable from their identity. It wants to lock them into a single, uniform “self” that persists throughout their lives, unfolding in a coherent narrative beginning in childhood and ending, one presumes, with death. This fits with its founder’s narrow conception of the self and its possibilities. “You have one identity,” Mark Zuckerberg has said. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He even argues that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”35 That view, not surprisingly, dovetails with Facebook’s desire to package its members as neat and coherent sets of data for advertisers.


pages: 403 words: 87,035

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

“Tech insiders thought it was trying to compete more effectively with Twitter. But Facebook was really after FriendFeed’s dozen well-regarded product managers and engineers,” including its cofounder Bret Taylor. The price tag for FriendFeed is estimated to be $47 million, or $4 million per employee. “We really wanted to get Bret,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, remarked at the time. “Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good,” he went on to say. “They are 100 times better.” Zuckerberg’s comments are particularly revealing. The rise of the innovation sector is associated with an increase in the value of talent, for a simple reason: economic value depends on talent as never before.

For example, studies have shown that among doctors, specialists perform a narrower set of activities in large cities than in small ones. But market size does not matter very much for unskilled workers; manual laborers and carpenters perform similar tasks in large and small cities. Think about the history of Facebook. As everyone who has seen the movie The Social Network knows, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cambridge boasts the most impressive concentration of top universities in the world and is one of the best-educated cities in America. Plenty of innovative companies are in the area, and there is definitely no shortage of talent.

When Bill Gates decided that working for Microsoft was more important than finishing Harvard, it was a turning point for the software industry. If he had finished college first, Microsoft might not have become the dominant force it later became, and Gates himself would have been several billions poorer today. If Mark Zuckerberg had stayed in college, his nemeses, the Winklevoss twins, might have developed a social networking site before him. In 2010 the venture capitalist Peter Thiel launched a controversial charity that offers $100,000 scholarships to twenty-year-olds with exceptionally promising business ideas to enable them to drop out of college.


pages: 282 words: 85,658

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

Understanding the value of Agile, as well as how your teams have implemented it, will help make sense of the sometimes counterintuitive, and often frustrating answers you get when you seek certainty from your product teams. Chapter 11 Invest in Infrastructure Move fast and break things. —Mark Zuckerberg, 2009 Move fast with stable infra. —Mark Zuckerberg, 2014 Mark Zuckerberg’s famous tagline “Move fast and break things” was brilliant, but ultimately insincere. So it was unsurprising that he ended up changing it in 2014 to the far less memorable “Move fast with stable infra[structure].” The tension between those two statements is what this chapter is about.


pages: 541 words: 173,676

Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Some of these luminaries are still famous, while others were well-known in decades past and have since faded, so might provide a pleasant surge of nostalgia if you remember them when. Listing people by generation provides a new perspective outside of the usual prototypical representatives of a generation. Most people know that Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was a Gen X’er—but so are Jimmy Fallon, Kanye West, Blake Shelton, Julia Roberts, Elon Musk, and Jennifer Lopez. Mark Zuckerberg is a quintessential Millennial, but the generation also includes Beyoncé, Michael Phelps, and Lady Gaga. You may find a few surprises: Until I made these lists, I didn’t realize that Melania Trump was a Gen X’er. There are also some intriguing parallels: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born in the same year, 1955.

Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey (b. 1976), and Uber by Travis Kalanick (b. 1976) and Garrett Camp (b. 1978). Sean Parker (b. 1979) cofounded Napster, the file-sharing music site later shut down over copyright issues, and served as the first president of Facebook. Gen X’er Sheryl Sandberg (b. 1969) didn’t found Facebook—that would be Millennial Mark Zuckerberg—but she helped run it for a decade. So, when it comes to the internet, Gen X was first. Gen X was also last. Gen X is the last generation to have had a mostly analog childhood. They are the last to use rotary phones instead of push-button or wireless; the last to languish in a childhood without cable TV or videotapes; the last to spend their high school years without the internet; the last to learn to type as teens instead of as children; the last to use a typewriter for their college essays; the last to look things up in bound encyclopedias; the last to use cameras with film; the last to use a radio with a dial, buy cassette tapes, or attempt to scam the Columbia Record Club (thirteen records or tapes for $1!)

MOST POPULAR FIRST NAMES * First appearance on the list Boys Michael Christopher Joshua* Matthew* Jason David James Daniel* Andrew* Tyler* Girls Jessica Ashley* Jennifer Sarah* Amanda Brittany* Melissa* Samantha* Emily* FAMOUS MEMBERS (BIRTH YEAR) Actors, Comedians, Filmmakers Kim Kardashian (1980) Lin-Manuel Miranda (1980) Chris Pine (1980) Chris Evans (1981) Amy Schumer (1981) Elijah Wood (1981) Kirsten Dunst (1982) Colin Jost (1982) Seth Rogen (1982) Ali Wong (1982) Constance Wu (1982) Adam Driver (1983) Aziz Ansari (1983) Michael Che (1983) Jonah Hill (1983) Mila Kunis (1983) Dan Levy (1983) Donald Glover (1983) America Ferrera (1984) Khloe Kardashian (1984) Gina Rodriguez (1984) Olivia Wilde (1984) Scarlett Johansson (1984) Kate McKinnon (1984) Issa Rae (1985) Kaley Cuoco (1985) Hasan Minhaj (1985) Lena Dunham (1986) Lindsay Lohan (1986) Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (1986) Elliot Page (1987) Zac Efron (1987) Blake Lively (1987) Awkwafina (1988) Emma Stone (1988) Haley Joel Osment (1988) Rachel Brosnahan (1990) Jennifer Lawrence (1990) Kristen Stewart (1990) Bowen Yang (1990) Shailene Woodley (1991) Miley Cyrus (1992) Dylan and Cole Sprouse (1992) Beanie Feldstein (1993) Pete Davidson (1993) Dakota Fanning (1994) Musicians and Artists Josh Groban (1981) Beyoncé Knowles (1981) Britney Spears (1981) Alicia Keys (1981) Justin Timberlake (1981) Jennifer Hudson (1981) LeAnn Rimes (1982) Kelly Clarkson (1982) Adam Lambert (1982) Nicki Minaj (1982) Miranda Lambert (1983) Carrie Underwood (1983) Katy Perry (1984) Mandy Moore (1984) Ciara (1985) Lady Gaga (1986) Kevin Jonas (1987) Kendrick Lamar (1987) Zoë Kravitz (1988) Joe Jonas (1989) Taylor Swift (1989) Nick Jonas (1992) Demi Lovato (1992) Selena Gomez (1992) Cardi B (1992) Ariana Grande (1993) Chance the Rapper (1993) Justin Bieber (1994) Entrepreneurs and Businesspeople Mark Zuckerberg (1984) Evan Spiegel (1990) Politicians, Judges, and Activists Pete Buttigieg (1982) Ilhan Omar (1982) Sarah Huckabee Sanders (1982) Katie Britt (1982) Elise Stefanik (1984) J. D. Vance (1984) Jon Ossoff (1987) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989) Athletes and Sports Figures Venus Williams (1980) Eli Manning (1981) Hope Solo (1981) Serena Williams (1981) Andy Roddick (1982) Aaron Rodgers (1983) LeBron James (1984) Ryan Lochte (1984) Kyle Busch (1985) Megan Rapinoe (1985) Michael Phelps (1985) Allyson Felix (1985) Shaun White (1986) Colin Kaepernick (1987) Steph Curry (1988) Kevin Durant (1988) Brittney Griner (1990) Bethany Hamilton (1990) Damian Lillard (1990) Mike Trout (1991) Bryce Harper (1992) Johnny Manziel (1992) Journalists, Authors, and People in the News Chelsea Clinton (1980) Jenna Bush Hager (1981) Paris Hilton (1981) Meghan Markle (1981) Nicole Richie (1981) Ivanka Trump (1981) Misty Copeland (1982) Anita Sarkeesian (1983) Edward Snowden (1983) Elizabeth Holmes (1984) Ben Shapiro (1984) Eric Trump (1984) Chrissy Teigen (1985) Daniel M.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

Because Google was already warring in the courts with publishers and the Authors Guild, this battle with Viacom opened a second front in the war with old media. And soon there would be other skirmishes, including those with new media companies like Facebook, the fastest growing social network. With more than forty million active users in the summer of 2007, Facebook “doubles in size every six months,” said founder Mark Zuckerberg. Then twenty-two, Zuckerberg is a Harvard dropout who in the early days of his company’s life slept on a mattress on the floor of a Palo Alto apartment he rented near his office, allowing him to move effortlessly between work and sleep. His baby face is framed with curly hair, and because he is thin, with a relatively long torso, one is surprised that he stands only five feet eight inches tall.

Frustrated by what friends say was sometimes chaotic management at Google, and wanting broader responsibilities to address these, Sandberg left in March 2008 to accept the title of chief operating officer at Facebook. Venture capitalist Roger McNamee, an investor in Facebook and a close friend of Sandberg‘s, introduced her to founder Mark Zuckerberg. “Sheryl created AdWords,” he said. “The idea had many parents, but the execution was hers.” Her title, vice president, global online sales and operations, did not reflect her importance, he said. And he believed she was junior to some “tired executives.” In the effort to keep her, Google offered her the CFO job, which she declined.

She was the friendly face at Google that some traditional media company executives trusted enough to let their hair down and ask: How can Google help my troubled business? Google executives were stumped as to why Sandberg would take the job at Facebook. She wasn’t given the same broad responsibilities as most COOs: vital parts of Facebook—product management and development, engineering, and finance—would continue to report to founder Mark Zuckerberg. And they didn’t understand why she would leave for a company that, according to one Facebook insider, had generated only $150 million in revenues in 2007 and was bleeding money. Google was already anxious about Facebook, and Sandberg’s defection elevated their discomfort. True, Facebook wasn’t making money, but neither had Google in its first four years.


pages: 588 words: 131,025

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

A. Srivastava, “2 Billion Smartphone Users by 2015: 83% of Internet Usage from Mobiles,” Daze Info, January 23, 2014, http://www.dazeinfo.com/2014/01/23/smartphone-users-growth-mobile-internet-2014-2017/. 12. M. Zuckerberg, “Mark Zuckerberg on a Future Where the Internet Is Available to All,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-on-a-future-where-the-internet-is-available-to-all-1404762276. 13. “The Rise of the Cheap Smartphone,” The Economist, April 5, 2014, http://www.economist.com/node/21600134/print. 14. M. Honan, “Don’t Diss Cheap Smartphones.

They’re About to Change Everything,” Wired, May 16, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/05/cheap-smartphones/. 71. H. Vogt, “Using Free Wi-Fi to Connect Africa’s Unconnected,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303287804579447323711745040. 72. M. Zuckerberg, “Mark Zuckerberg on a Future Where the Internet Is Available to All,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-on-a-future-where-the-internet-is-available-to-all-1404762276. 73. D. Fletcher, “Daniel Fletcher: Why Your iPhone Upgrade Is Good for the Poor,” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324492604579083762147495666. 74.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

., “From Communism to Capitalism: Private versus Public Property and Inequality in China and Russia,” AEA Papers and Proceedings 108 (May 2018): 111. 22. Ibid., 112. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Sebastian Mallaby, The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future (New York: Penguin Press, 2022), 273–75. 26. Michael Arrington, “Exclusive Video: Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner Talk about Facebook’s New Investment,” TechCrunch, May 26, 2009, https://techcrunch.com/2009/05/26/mark-zuckerberg-and-yuri-milner-talk-about-facebooks-new-investment-video. 27. “Alisher Usmanov: What Makes the Russian Britain’s Richest Person?” Guardian, April 22, 2013. 28. Juliette Garside, “Russia’s Richest Man Cashes In on Facebook Share Recovery,” Guardian, September 5, 2013. 29.

But considering that, Google’s core function held a contradiction: By trying to get users to the perfect site, Google was throwing them off its own pages. Search remains the world’s biggest product monopoly, and yet there was another layer of the web no one had been able to hold. It took one more scraper to figure it out. Born in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg grew up in Westchester County, New York, the socially awkward son of a technologically inclined dentist whose practice operated out of the family home. If his father was part of the personal revolution—a small businessman working on a PC—then Mark was an internetworking kid, coding a messenger program to communicate between the dental office and house computers.

Zuck didn’t get kicked out, but Facemash was the beginning of the end for him at school. The god’s-eye view of his fellow students’ private and public behavior, watching them condemn the site while flocking to it in droves, seems to have only spurred his contempt for the hypocrite masses and their bureaucrat leaders. So how did Mark Zuckerberg become the world’s crown prince of friendship? There were a lot of people building online social networks in the early 2000s. As David Fincher’s film The Social Network dramatizes, several people were trying to build a social network at Harvard in the early 2000s. Zuckerberg wasn’t even the first guy to finish an online social network at an elite college—that was Stanford’s Orkut Büyükkökten, who later repeated the feat for his employer, Google.


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Making matters worse, remember, in a successful corporate environment total economic activity decreases as money is sucked up into share value. It’s as if the business world is morphing into a video game. We can only wonder who the eventual winner of the growth game will be as the Gini number creeps upward toward one. Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos . . . ? They’re playing in a winner-takes-all competition. Google is trying to leverage its platform monopoly to become a shopping platform, Facebook is leveraging its monopoly in social media to become an advertising service, and Amazon is leveraging its store to become a cloud service.

Vicarious claims to have succeeded, and its first Turing test demonstrations appear to back up its claim.76 How would such a technology be deployed or monetized? Vicarious doesn’t need to worry about that just yet. As a flexible purpose corporation, Vicarious can work with the long-term, big picture, experimental approach required to innovate in a still-emerging field such as AI. Although investors including Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel have invested $56 million in the company, the flexible purpose structure prevents them from exerting the sort of pressure to get to market that venture capitalists typically put on their investments. The company can’t be forced to sell out or to abandon scientific curiosity for commercial viability.

If they were actually to catch on, investors reasoned, those who got in early would have cornered the market on an entire currency. That’s why from 2012 to 2013, the price of a single bitcoin skyrocketed, from ten dollars in November 2012 to a thousand dollars a year later.35 There are now bitcoin investment funds—one famously started by the Winklevoss twins, known best for hiring college student Mark Zuckerberg to build their social network platform and subsequently losing it to him. They may be missing the nature of this opportunity as well. Bitcoin money is only a utility—not the thing of value in itself. It’s a label. If bitcoins become too precious and scarce, there are always plenty of alternative blockchain currencies to use instead.


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How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

They said, “We want to delight our users.” This is the mindset that helped build Skype, Baidu, Tesla and SpaceX. And it probably should be the mindset you use as you become a Startup Hero. I recently talked to my friend Marc Benioff, who is the founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce. He told me that when he spoke to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Mark said, “You don’t have much of a technology orientation, do you?” Marc responded, “We have a customer orientation.” The customer is always right, and if you delight your customer, your brand will expand in a positive way, your business will thrive, and you will move the world forward.

However, the music industry got a worse deal than they would have had with Napster, and Napster had to shut down its service. Incidentally, this failure didn't deter the founders from trying again. Both have become enormously successful with their post-Napster efforts. Sean Parker went on to help Mark Zuckerberg in the founding of Facebook, and Shawn Fanning started a flurry of companies around derivations of the file sharing theme. Fail and fail again until you succeed. ✽✽✽ Make a list of all your failures. Your failures should make you proud. Keep failing. Keep living. Keep trying. ✽✽✽ As much as I recommend trying and failing, I also believe a Startup Hero should be wise and learn from their mistakes.

We teach future instead of history, we have a team-based approach rather than individualistic one, and while other schools fall in line with anything that ensures safety, we proudly declare ourselves to be a dangerous school, complete with survival training and open-ended projects and challenges. We believe that students, put to the task, can perform at a much higher level than ever imagined by other schools, and we believe that a student with a purpose can achieve anything in his or her imagination. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Elizabeth Holmes, Michael Dell, and many others dropped out of school to pursue their dreams. And they were enormously successful -- in some cases, in spite of their formal education. At Draper University, we embrace and support people who have the gumption to break from the pack to start businesses that might transform industries.


pages: 321 words: 89,109

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

Indeed this New Space push is fueled by who we call the space billionaires. At the head of the space billionaire pack are Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com; Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft; Elon Musk (founder of Space X, Paypal, and Tesla); Robert Bigelow, owner of Budget Suites; Sir Richard Branson, head of Virgin Galactic; Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; and electronic game inventor John Carmack, who created “Doom” and “Quake.” It is these people that are upending the world of technology and global enterprise at planetary levels who will be prominent in the space business during the twenty-first century. This book is intended to reveal to a broader audience the cornucopia of new enterprises that could be opening up in the next few years.

These initiatives include new cost efficient launch systems, 3D manufacture of new types of satellite networking constellations and even high altitude balloons to support Internet connectivity. Silicon Valley has apparently discovered the “New Space religion” and how it can change the world. Space commerce now represents a part of their growth strategy. With very moxie corporate titans who embrace disruptive technologies—such as Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos—the world of space will apparently change at an even faster pace. Even Paul Allen of Microsoft fame is in on the act via his Vulcan Technologies that is now leading the development of the huge Strato launch vehicle that will serve as a high altitude carrier plane for new types of commercial launch vehicles.

It is even advanced building materials systems, housing built by 3-D printers, and “smart” building systems designs. These state of the art sustainable products are not being promoted by bleeding heart liberal environmentalists but are being developed by today’s leading figures, such as Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook, Elon Musk of Tesla, and other forward-looking smart industrialists around the world. 3. Planetary Protection to Preserve Modern Infrastructure and Avoid Global Destruction. One of the keys to the future of human survival is for the world’s space agencies to finally recognize that their top strategic objective is to deploy space systems that would save Earth from massive destruction.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

PROFIT The social responsibility of business, according to Milton Friedman, is to increase its profits. So with profits of some $5 billion a quarter, you would have thought that Facebook would be sitting pretty. But recent times have seen the social media company attacked from many directions. Indeed, late in 2018 Wired magazine listed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as one of the “Most Dangerous People on the Internet in 2018.”21 Zuckerberg appeared alongside people like Russian president Vladimir Putin and Min Aung Hlaing, head of Myanmar’s (Burma’s) armed forces. The reason why Min Aung Hlaing made the list was that he had used social media to promote hate speech, inflaming the country’s genocidal war against the Rohingya people.

Did they see the writing on Carillion’s wall even as they signed off on this propaganda? Nor is it just businesses in such everyday sectors getting into trouble. Take Facebook again. As 2019 dawned, the company was still in the dock after what the media described as a “tsunami of crises.” Speaking on behalf of the company he founded as recently as 2006, CEO Mark Zuckerberg protested the following: We’re a very different company than we were in 2016, or even a year ago. We’ve fundamentally altered our DNA to focus more on preventing harm from all our services, and we’ve systematically shifted a large portion of our company to work on preventing harm.22 That is a seriously charitable—some might argue self-serving—picture of what has actually been going on as Facebook scrambled to protect and grow its $5 billion of profit each quarter.

You’re doing a brilliant job of listening, Jack, but can you actually dial up the urgency and move on this stuff?” That anger suggests a growing awareness of the Black and Gray Swan potentials of our fast-evolving electronic habitats. The day before Dorsey appeared at TED, interestingly, a well-known journalist had issued a challenge to all the “gods of Silicon Valley,” listing them—Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and, yes, Jack Dorsey. Carole Cadwalladr was the brilliant journalist who broke the story about the role of Cambridge Analytica in distorting the UK vote on Brexit.6 Here is what she had to say: “This technology you have invented has been amazing, but now it is a crime scene.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

As a speculative investment, the virtual “coins” have engendered scores of real millionaires and even billionaires, with actual addresses, not merely URLs, in places like San Francisco, New York, Woodside, Greenwich, Palo Alto, Shanghai, London, Malta, Seattle, and Buenos Aires. At the 2014 Bitcoin Summit, joining the fray of Satoshistas is Chamath Palihapitiya, a ferociously smart near-billionaire from Sri Lanka, a former force and friend of Mark (Zuckerberg) at Facebook. Virtually the only man at the summit wearing a suit and tie, Palihapitiya at the time owns some fifty million dollars’ worth of bitcoins. Tall, dark, and lean, the physical opposite of the Nordic bear Andreessen, the Sri Lankan warns against “hyperbolic bullshit” from others. But as for himself, “When I buy bitcoin, I am using capital to support a way of ripping apart the financial system.”

From one point of view, Thiel’s fellowships are an ingenious way for a venture capitalist to find the most driven, capable, and even impatient entrepreneurial talent in the new generation of students. Thiel’s fortune began with PayPal, but it reached its apogee when he persuaded eighteen-year-old Mark Zuckerberg to move Harvard’s Facebook to Silicon Valley and open it to the world. When Internet bulletin boards and social networks such as MySpace were seething with murky anonymity, Thiel saw that what the Internet needed was faces. He sought the accountability of real identities behind Internet posts.

Entering the “happening” phase, virtual reality pervades the venerable Internet Trends Report by Mary Meeker of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. She reports that consumers are buying headsets at a slow but steady rate, while gaming companies pull in real money on VR titles. Entrepreneurs are often fans of gaming, Meeker notes, citing Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Mark Zuckerberg. Global interactive gaming is becoming mainstream, with 2.6 billion gamers in 2017, up twenty-six-fold in little more than a decade. Global gaming revenue surged more than $100 billion in 2017, and China is now the top market. I tell the Strivr team—Hillenmeyer and Belch—that OTOY is planning a global computer platform for VR rendering anywhere on the cheap.


pages: 167 words: 49,719

Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism by Fumio Sasaki

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, death from overwork, fixed-gear, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, Skype, Steve Jobs

Reducing the number of items that we own does not reduce our satisfaction. 2: Find your unique uniform. Steve Jobs always wore the same clothes: a black turtleneck by Issey Miyake, Levi’s 501s, and a pair of New Balance sneakers, which even served as his attire for public presentations. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg seems to be fond of a gray T-shirt. Einstein is said to have always worn the same type of jacket. These people took the time that others spend on choosing clothes and chasing trends and turned their attention instead to the things that mattered most to them. We don’t need to have a lot of clothes to live a clean, comfortable life.

—ICHIRO KISHIMI AND FUMITAKE KOGA, KIRAWARERU YUKI (COURAGE TO BE DISLIKED) Steve Jobs didn’t get nervous In the process of minimizing, I went through my clothes and minimized my wardrobe as well. As I explained in chapter 3, it’s possible to create more time and focus on the important things if we consider personal uniforms. Steve Jobs had his black turtleneck, and Mark Zuckerberg has his gray T-shirt. They agreed that it’s a waste of time selecting which clothes you want to wear. They would rather spend that time doing something creative. There’s another benefit to a minimalist wardrobe. Because we choose items that are timeless, we don’t need to worry about being out of style.


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

AI, he says, is “a story we computer scientists made up to help us get funding once upon a time.”30 Imperfect software, Lanier says, not ever-faster hardware, puts an effective limit on our danger. “Software is brittle,” he says. “If every little thing isn’t perfect, it breaks.”31 For his part, Mark Zuckerberg has described Musk’s worries as “hysterical,” and indeed, a few weeks after the Tesla baron made public his fears, the Facebook baron announced that he was building a helpful AI to run his house. It would recognize his friends and let them in. It would monitor the nursery. It would make toast.

Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion Dollar Crusade,” p. 90. 33. Sam Thielman, “Is Facebook Even Capable of Stopping an Influence Campaign on Its Platform?” Talking Points Memo, September 15, 2017. 34. James Walker, “Researchers Shut Down AI that Invented Its Own Language,” digitaljournal.com, July 21, 2017. 35. Cade Metz, “Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and the Feud over Killer Robots,” New York Times, June 9, 2018. 36. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion Dollar Crusade,” p. 91. 37. Khatchadourian, “Doomsday Invention.” CHAPTER 16 1. Knoepfler, GMO Sapiens, p. 177. 2. Rachel Nuwer, “Babies Start Learning Language in the Womb,” smithsonianmag.com, January 4, 2013. 3.

Preetika Rana, “China, Unhampered by Rules, Races Ahead in Gene-Editing Trials,” Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2018. 13. “Biggest AI Startup Boosts Fundraising to $1.2 Billion,” Bloomberg News, May 30, 2018. 14. James Vincent, “Putin Says the Nation that Leads in AI ‘Will Be the Ruler of the World,’” theverge.com, September 4, 2017. 15. Maureen Dowd, “Will Mark Zuckerberg ‘Like’ This Column?” New York Times, November 23, 2017. 16. Susan Ratcliffe, ed., “J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–67, American Physicist,” oxfordreference.com, 2016. 17. Barrat, Our Final Invention, p. 52. 18. Julian Savulescu, “As a Species, We Have a Moral Obligation to Enhance Ourselves,” ideas.ted.com, February 19, 2014. 19.


pages: 391 words: 97,018

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The crowd listened closely to words of wisdom from the Nobelist Elie Wiesel and President Shimon Peres of Israel and to a brief talk on the week’s Torah portion by Israel’s onetime Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau. But things really perked up when Randi Zuckerberg, the sister of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and a senior executive at the company, sang “Jerusalem of Gold” in a bright vibrato. In violation of both good taste and the laws of Shabbat, Zuckerberg, one of the emerging It Girls of the global economic scene, proceeded to post the clip on Facebook. Throughout the week at Davos, insiders swapped tales of glimpsing Mark Zuckerberg the way people on safari note the sighting of a cheetah. The social networking site had definitely arrived, and it was staking its claim as a hot new player.

But consider this: in 2002, in the wake of the previous meltdown and crisis in American confidence, none of these companies existed in anything like their current form. Their combined market capitalization was a few billion dollars, consisting mostly of Apple, an also-ran personal computer maker whose stock traded for less than the value of the cash on its balance sheet. Google was a piece of code, not one of the most profitable businesses known to man. Mark Zuckerberg was just entering Harvard. All three exploded from nothing, gained mass and scale during the long expansion of the 2000s, and boomed in the years after the Lehman Brothers crash. For these companies, the period of decline has been an era of triumph. Eight hundred billion dollars in market capitalization can vanish rather quickly.


pages: 324 words: 96,491

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

But we often forget, as I did when crowdsourcing terrorism analysis, that the “core,” the technological and academic elite, dominated the internet and were the first to arrive on social media. The initial members of the crowd were those privileged enough to have internet access and afford a smartphone. An early crowd member—from the mid-1990s until the late 2000s—needed some education and training to create and moderate content on forums, blogs, and chatrooms. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook at Harvard, after all, not in the failed state of Somalia. The first crowds on the internet and social media were more educated, experienced, and privileged—collectively smarter than the core. The experts at the core still held a repository of experience, reasoning, and knowledge to effectively harness the crowd’s energy for discrete tasks and specified disciplines, determining what insights and innovations were outpacing existing pre-internet libraries and industry practices.

Facebook took the greatest leaps to tackle its fake news problem, focusing on three key areas to improve the integrity of information on its platform: disrupting economic incentives, building new products to curb the spread of false news, and helping people make more informed decisions when they encounter false news.34 The company routinely closed accounts in 2018, tested and innovated new fact-checking methods, worked with governments to counter inauthentic activity, and constructed an elaborate war room for the midterm elections. Even when dragged in front of Congress, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, known for public awkwardness, sailed through testimony, fully overmatching his congressional interrogators, who seemed ill equipped or laughably out of touch with regard to how today’s technology works. Facebook’s second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg, did equally well, and it looked for most of the past year as if the public’s and regulators’ ire toward Facebook would wane.

Two years of public outrage and congressional hearings would lead one to believe that government regulation would have been instituted, but that would not be true. Every congressional session with the social media giants showed just how unlikely lawmakers are to effectively regulate tech companies. Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai—introverted techies—all handled congressional grilling well and outmatched the legislators who would regulate them. Even when bipartisan support for legislation exists, Congress has been unable to move laws forward to help defend the 2018 midterm elections.


pages: 350 words: 98,077

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

Kelly, “The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World,” Wired, Oct. 27, 2014.   6.  J. Despres, “Scenario: Shane Legg,” Future, accessed Dec. 4, 2018, future.wikia.com/wiki/Scenario:_Shane_Legg.   7.  Quoted in H. McCracken, “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Bold Plan for the Future of Facebook,” Fast Company, Nov. 16, 2015, www.fastcompany.com/3052885/mark-zuckerberg-facebook.   8.  V. C. Müller and N. Bostrom, “Future Progress in Artificial Intelligence: A Survey of Expert Opinion,” in Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence, ed. V. C. Müller (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2016), 555–72.   9.  

AI: Narrow and General, Weak and Strong Like every AI spring before it, our current one features experts predicting that “general AI”—AI that equals or surpasses humans in most ways—will be here soon. “Human level AI will be passed in the mid-2020s,”6 predicted Shane Legg, cofounder of Google DeepMind, in 2016. A year earlier, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, declared, “One of our goals for the next five to 10 years is to basically get better than human level at all of the primary human senses: vision, hearing, language, general cognition.”7 The AI philosophers Vincent Müller and Nick Bostrom published a 2013 poll of AI researchers in which many assigned a 50 percent chance of human-level AI by the year 2040.8 While much of this optimism is based on the recent successes of deep learning, these programs—like all instances of AI to date—are still examples of what is called “narrow” or “weak” AI.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Platform companies have been promoting this vision, and appeals to AI are part of the strategy.20 For if supposedly superhuman AI systems can guide or replace scientists, then metrics that quantify “good” science will be needed—otherwise, what would AI systems “maximize”? Companies like Google are in the business of defining these metrics via platforms such as Google Scholar. Other platform companies are also using their computational capital to gain influence within science. The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, a for-profit company cofounded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, recently acquired a startup company whose “AI” software supposedly “helps scientists read, understand and prioritize millions of scientific papers” by analyzing these metrics.21 As platform companies promote this vision of science, the metrics they collect are being held up as indicators of scientific worth.

Philip Mirowski, Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 25.   20.   For an analysis of the interest of major platform companies (such as Facebook) in scientific research, see Philip Mirowski, “The Future(s) of Open Science,” Social Studies of Science 48, no. 2 (2018): 171–203.   21.   Kurt Wagner, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Philanthropy Organization Is Acquiring a Search and AI Startup Called Meta,” Recode, January 24, 2017.   22.   Antonio Regalado, “Google’s AI Explosion in One Chart,” MIT Technology Review, March 25, 2017.   23.   Jeremy Gillula and Daniel Nazer, Stupid Patent of the Month: Will Patents Slow Artificial Intelligence?

“Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator.” In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 3156–64. 2015. Vishwanath, Arun. “When a Robot Writes Your News, What Happens to Democracy?” CNN, February 27, 2018. Vitale, Alex S. The End of Policing. New York: Verso Books, 2018. Wagner, Kurt. “Mark Zuckerberg’s Philanthropy Organization Is Acquiring a Search and AI Startup Called Meta.” Recode, January 24, 2017. Wakabayashi, Daisuke, and Scott Shane. “Google Will Not Renew Pentagon Contract That Upset Employees.” New York Times, June 1, 2019. Wallis, Brian. “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes.”


pages: 329 words: 100,162

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

Despite the town’s values and some of his best efforts, however, Billy had managed to graduate high school without any felony arrests. He matriculated at Pennsylvania’s Bucknell University in the fall of 2010, with the intention of studying computer engineering, but by the spring of 2011, he was no longer a student. Billy’s friends remember him framing his decision to drop out as a Mark Zuckerberg–inspired move that would enable him to immediately start squeezing big money out of a start-up he had founded called Spling. Early pitch decks show that Spling had originally been intended to be a sort of mash-up of Reddit and Pinterest, a site where users could share links with their friends in an “intersection between social networking and microblogging with a scope refined for entertainment.”

With dozens of featured talks each day on topics ranging from “Four Automated Email Series That Get Serious Results” to “Convincing Customers to Swipe Right on Your Brand,” the summit was a whirlwind of persuasive tactics for just about every program and device you could think of, whether you were approaching it from a direct-to-consumer or business-to-business background. This particular North Carolina Glengarry Glen Ross cosplay convention also included a keynote address in which a woman most famous for being Mark Zuckerberg’s sister performed a parody song about the internet, the Marriott did a thirty-minute ad for its Las Vegas property and called it a talk on FOMO, and I gave up my email address at a kiosk in exchange for a two-dollar bill stamped with the name of an SEO company. But the interesting thing about Atkins’s appearance was that he wasn’t being billed as some sort of cautionary tale—he was being presented as a marketing legend.

And 42West, working until the last minute, planted a positive Vanity Fair piece that, while a total puff piece, did note one major risk associated with Fyre: concerns that all the publicity might “compromise the islands’ exclusivity.”143 * * * In retrospect, social media users and the influencers who star on these platforms couldn’t have been more primed to get snookered en masse by something like the Fyre Festival. The only surprise is that it took so long to happen. For one thing, we’re hopelessly addicted to social media. What started out as a way for Mark Zuckerberg to rate attractive Harvard students quickly turned into a way for all of us to judge—and be judged. It was so fun and exciting, consuming this constantly updated feed of all the things our friends, family, and the celebrities we identify with were consuming that we didn’t even mind as we became the product and our feeds turned into lifestyle catalogs.


pages: 309 words: 96,168

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

Margaret recalls how she once shared this observation at a business conference. “When the next speaker, a chief technology officer, came onstage, somebody in the audience asked him, ‘Who helped you in the course of your career?’ He couldn’t think of anybody. And there was this sort of stunned, horrified silence.” Another don’t is from Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who says: Don’t hire someone to work for you unless you would work for them in an alternate universe. “Which doesn’t mean that you should give them your job,” Zuckerberg adds, “but just imagine if the tables were turned and you were looking for a job—would you be comfortable working for this person?”

You’ll be wasting not only your time; you’ll also be wasting your window of opportunity. You can read more about this topic in Blitzscaling, where “Launch a Product That Embarrasses You” is #4 on my list of Counterintuitive Rules of Blitzscaling. * * * — One of the biggest champions of experimentation in Silicon Valley has been Mark Zuckerberg, whose early mantra—“Move fast and break things”—was a foundation for Facebook’s success. And the company continues to experiment constantly today, even at its current size—though its mantra now is “Move fast with stable infrastructure.” As Mark says, “At any given point in time, there isn’t just one version of Facebook running—there are probably ten thousand.

An essential skill for anyone bringing a new product or service into the world is to balance those two forms of user feedback—and when in doubt, watch what they do, not what they say. The problem with predicting the future Something similar happened at Facebook, which famously began as a service for Harvard students before spreading to other universities and then the wider world. But if founder Mark Zuckerberg had listened to what those early users told him, it would’ve been a different story. It seemed clear that the one thing Harvard students loved most about Facebook was its exclusivity. So when Facebook first launched at Yale, Mark says, “All the people at Harvard were like, ‘Oh, come on. Them?’


Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

A bunch of us said yes, and he opened his jacket pockets and produced all of these experimental KIND Bars that none of us had seen before; he was the Batman of snacks.) Even for people at this level, our function was mostly ceremonial. We convened at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Palo Alto in 2016. The highlight of the event was Mark Zuckerberg sitting on a stage and advising young entrepreneurs from around the world. Some of these entrepreneurs were from Africa and clearly of modest means. I felt like screaming out, “Mark, cut these folks a check!” from my seat in the tenth row. But no. It seemed that the entrepreneurs walked away with a photo of being onstage with Mark and some advice.

Progressives on the other hand argue that hateful and racist language and ideologies have been allowed to spread unchecked on these platforms. The latter concern led to a boycott of Facebook known as “Stop Hate for Profit” in July 2020 that included hundreds of companies like Pfizer, Ford, Unilever, and Verizon. In response, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, reportedly told people that these companies account for a tiny slice of Facebook’s revenue and there was nothing to worry about: the top hundred advertisers on Facebook are less than 6 percent of the company’s revenue. The Stop Hate for Profit campaign continued with celebrities like Rosario Dawson and Katy Perry taking a break from Instagram.

There is no reason to protect a company from the consequences of an affirmative decision it makes to maximize its own profitability, as distinct from allowing the initial post. At present, Facebook has been arguing for itself as something of a public commons that should be left to its own devices and allowed to self-moderate while having all of the for-profit benefits of a private company. Mark Zuckerberg is worth $100 billion running a social network that reaches billions but still pretends to be the town bulletin board. Amending section 230 is thus immensely powerful and a historic opportunity. Instead of saying “Platforms are not responsible for the content they publish that is created by someone else,” we could change the standard to “Social media platforms are responsible for any content they amplify.”


pages: 201 words: 21,180

Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter

barriers to entry, classic study, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fail fast, Howard Rheingold, late fees, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Ralph Waldo Emerson, recommendation engine, social bookmarking, social software, social web, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Figure 5.15 The protest group “Students Against Facebook News Feed” was created and grew within the very framework it was protesting. Mark Zuckerberg, the twenty-two-year-old CEO of Facebook, had a response for them. He wrote a blog post telling everyone to “calm down,” pointing out that the feature didn’t expose anything that wasn’t already on the site. He said that it was Facebook’s highest priority to protect its members, and pointed out that none of the information on the news feed features was actually new. The only difference was that now all that information had been aggregated into one place. Figure 5.16 Mark Zuckerberg’s first attempt at calming down the masses during the news feed blowup.


The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

This could be because native dropout minorities are the closest native substitutes for immigrants.”26 A related argument attributes a magical economic multiplier effect to immigrants. To lobby for more H-1B guest worker visas for foreign nationals, who are legally bound as indentured servants to their sponsoring corporations or intermediary firms known as “body shops,” Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley executives have formed a lobbying group named FWD.us. In the Washington Post Zuckerberg wrote: “Why do we offer so few H1B visas for talented specialists that the supply runs out within days of becoming available each year, even though we know each of these jobs will create two or three more American jobs in return?”

“The Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Wages and Employment Opportunities of Black Workers: A Briefing Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights” (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, August 2010). 26. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2017). 27. Mark Zuckerberg, “Immigrants Are the Key to a Knowledge Economy,” Washington Post, April 10, 2013. 28. Michael Lind, “Reich Is Wrong: Immigration Won’t Solve Entitlement Mess,” Salon, April 13, 2010. 29. Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, “Projecting the Impact of Immigration on the U.S. Population: A Look at Size and Age Structure through 2060,” Center for Immigration Studies, February 4, 2019. 30.


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100 Things We've Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Big Tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, financial independence, Google Earth, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, TikTok, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Wall-E

The coronavirus quarantine, in which everyone was forced to present online all the time, only exacerbated this process, our home selves melding with our work selves and our social selves, all of us put into BBC Dad’s awkward shoes. On Facebook, you become the same “you” to your friends, your co-workers, your parents, and your future children. As Mark Zuckerberg puts it, “The days of having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly…. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Is it a lack of integrity? Or is it flexibility—the ability to flub things and learn, to change, to take comfort in a deeply human inconstancy, something we rely on to stretch ourselves and grow?

The worse things look—within a certain safe zone—the more likely the compulsion to fling it out there. Now that we all can share, we do, amplifying a minor flub well beyond its natural proportions. It’s almost creepy how much we’ve taken the call to share our lives to heart. “We’ll share everything, even our worst!” we seem to be collectively assuring Mark Zuckerberg. Perhaps, if we’re honest with ourselves, we do it to ward off the possibility of something truly awful happening to us and being exposed online. These are the small, superstitious sacrifices we are willing to make. We are also willing participants in the outing of others’ petty crimes, compelled to say, “I saw that.”


pages: 559 words: 155,372

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Plus, the additional cash or Twitter stock would have served as a hedge to my all-in position in Facebook. Morality, such as it exists in the tech whorehouse, is an expensive hobby indeed. Part Three Move Fast and Break Things Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected. —Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Inc. IPO documents (2012) Boot Camp Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helpers whom he met before his entrance into this region.

How it went from advertising zero to hero is the crux of this story. Google Delenda Est By itself, genius can produce original thoughts just as little as a woman by herself can bear children. Outward circumstances must come to fructify genius, and be, as it were, a father to its progeny. —Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Genius,” The Art of Literature JUNE 2011 Mark Zuckerberg is a genius. Not in the Asperger’s, autistic way depicted in the very fictional movie The Social Network, the cognitive genius of exceptional ability. That’s a modern definition that reduces the original meaning. Nor would I claim he was the Steve Jobsian product genius either. Anyone claiming as much will have to explain the crowded graveyard of forgotten Facebook product failures.

Facebook can’t wait for the developing world to get to First World standards of connectivity, so it must create it for them, using ad revenues in the developed world to subsidize this new air force’s deployment. In time, monetization will follow usage, as it always does. Money follows eyeballs, even if slowly. Eventually Russia, Iran, India, Brazil, and parts of Africa will fall to the Growth team’s patient ministrations. Then, Mark Zuckerberg, like a young Alexander the Great at the Indus River, will weep for having no more world to conquer. This all sounds very airy-fairy, so here’s a real example of the Ads versus Growth dialectic to illustrate: Among the various weird products I happened to manage while at Facebook, one is particularly relevant.


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The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

Special thanks also to Augustus Amund Wellner, for sharing my taste in memes. And thanks finally, as always, immeasurably, to Adina Ruiu. THE INTERNET IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT IS Introduction “Let us calculate!” “TO STRENGTHEN our social fabric and bring the world closer together.” This, maintains Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook Corporation, is his enterprise’s reason for being. Yet it would not take a particularly critical mind to notice that strengthening the social fabric and bringing the world closer together are not, in fact, what Facebook is doing. No, Facebook and the other big tech companies are, plainly, tearing the social fabric to threads, and pulling people apart.

With this in mind it will be worthwhile, in the following chapter, to continue to look at some other, and certainly less familiar, dimensions of the early history of computing, where, although the theorists and inventors were not specifically focused on developing networked systems of machines, they were nonetheless interested in thinking about the natural, cosmic, and mathematical principles that structure the world as a whole, and that thereby enable a particular machine in a particular location to do its beautiful work. 4 “How closely woven the web” THE INTERNET AS LOOM Warp and Woof “To strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.” In this seemingly straightforward description of Facebook’s reason for being, which we have already considered in the introduction, Mark Zuckerberg is relying on two metaphors so subtle that they might easily pass unnoticed. Society is not actually woven, and telecommunication does not shrink physical distances between people, but only creates the appearance of proximity. These metaphors are deeply rooted in human history, in the way human beings in different places and times have conceptualized society, nature, and society’s place in nature.


pages: 392 words: 108,745

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Titans 39 Decades before he founded Amazon: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on how he got a role in Star Trek Beyond, posted to YouTube on October 23, 2016, https://goo.gl/RJKBL1. 39 “build space hotels”: Luisa Yanez, “Jeff Bezos: A rocket launched from Miami’s Palmetto High,” Miami Herald, August 5, 2013, https://goo.gl/GxFrx8. 40 After the discussion with Hart: Greg Hart, interview with author, April 27, 2018. 41 “If we could build it”: this and subsequent quotes from Greg Hart come from interview with author, April 27, 2018. 41 “We think it [the project] is critical to Amazon’s success”: this and subsequent quotes from Al Lindsay, unless otherwise identified, come from interview with author, April 4, 2018. 42 Rohit Prasad, a scientist whom Amazon hired: Rohit Prasad, interview with author, April 2, 2018. 44 Bezos was reportedly aiming for the stars: Joshua Brustein, “The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/4SIi8F. 44 “hero feature”: Prasad, interview with author. 44 An article in Bloomberg Businessweek : Brustein, “The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo.” 45 “Amazon just surprised everyone”: Chris Welch, “Amazon just surprised everyone with a crazy speaker that talks to you,” The Verge, November 6, 2014, https://goo.gl/sVgsPi. 45 “Don’t laugh at or ignore”: Mike Elgan, “Why Amazon Echo is the future of every home,” Computerworld, November 8, 2014, https://goo.gl/wriJXE. 45 “the happiest person in the world”: this and other quotes from Adam Cheyer, unless otherwise indicated, come from interviews with author, April 19 and 23, 2018. 45 “Apple’s digital assistant was delivered”: Farhad Manjoo, “Siri Is a Gimmick and a Tease,” Slate, November 15, 2012, https://goo.gl/2cSoK. 46 Steve Wozniak, one of the original cofounders of Apple: Bryan Fitzgerald, “‘Woz’ gallops in to a horse’s rescue,” Albany Times Union, June 13, 2012, https://goo.gl/dPdHso. 46 Even Jack in the Box ran an ad: Yukari Iwatani Kane, Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 154. 46 Years later, some people who had worked: Aaron Tilley and Kevin McLaughlin, “The Seven-Year Itch: How Apple’s Marriage to Siri Turned Sour,” The Information, March 14, 2018, https://goo.gl/6e7BxM. 48 “artificially-intelligent orphan”: Bosker, “Siri Rising.” 48 “Siri’s various teams morphed”: Tilley and McLaughlin, “The Seven-Year Itch.” 48 John Burkey, who was part: John Burkey, interview with author, June 19, 2018. 49 “it’s really the first time in history”: Megan Garber, “Sorry, Siri: How Google Is Planning to Be Your New Personal Assistant,” The Atlantic, April 29, 2013, https://goo.gl/XFLPDP. 49 “We are not shipping”: Dan Farber, “Microsoft’s Bing seeks enlightenment with Satori,” CNET, July 30, 2013, https://goo.gl/fnLVmb. 50 CNN Tech ran an emblematic headline: Adrian Covert, “Meet Cortana, Microsoft’s Siri,” CNN Tech, April 2, 2014, https://goo.gl/pyoW4v. 50 “feels like a potent mashup of Google Now’s worldliness”: Chris Velazco, “Living with Cortana, Windows 10’s thoughtful, flaky assistant,” Engadget, July 30, 2015, https://goo.gl/mbZpon. 50 “arrogant disdain followed by panic”: Burkey, interview with author. 51 “I’ll start teaching it”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Jarvis,” Facebook blog, December 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/DyQSBN. 51 Zuckerberg might have to say a command: Daniel Terdiman, “At Home With Mark Zuckerberg And Jarvis, The AI Assistant He Built For His Family,” Fast Company, December 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/qJNIxW. 51 One lucky user who tested M: Alex Kantrowitz, “Facebook Reveals The Secrets Behind ‘M,’ Its Artificial Intelligence Bot,” BuzzFeed, November 19, 2015, https://goo.gl/bwmFyN. 52 “an experiment to see what people would ask”: Kemal El Moujahid, interview with author, September 29, 2017. 54 “just the tip of the iceberg”: Mark Bergen, “Jeff Bezos says more than 1,000 people are working on Amazon Echo and Alexa,” Recode, May 31, 2016, https://goo.gl/hhSQXc. 59 “When you speak”: Robert Hoffer, interview with author, April 30, 2018. 4.

The company’s reaction to the release of the Echo, he says, was one of “arrogant disdain followed by panic.” Alexa and Siri had made big splashes when they came out. But it wasn’t until the first half of 2016 that tech’s biggest players, acting as if they had all read the same memo, made full-throated declarations that conversation was the future of computing. CEO Mark Zuckerberg set the tone for the year on January 3 when he told the world that he was trying to create his own artificially intelligent assistant—like Jarvis from Iron Man. “I’ll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home—music, lights, temperature and so on,” Zuckerberg posted on Facebook.


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The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

and he called it ‘a trust fund for all’. Even broadly sympathetic people still find it necessary to frame the idea humorously like this as if to admit that it is essentially nuts or at least crazy, new-fangled, snowflake thinking. So when you hear that Bernie Sanders supports it, you think, ‘That figures.’ When you hear that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Richard Branson support it, you wonder what’s in it for those creepy rich hippies/high-minded technocrats. But when you find out that the idea begins with Thomas Paine and came very close to being implemented in 1969 as US government policy by one Richard Nixon (rich and creepy maybe, but certainly no hippie and certainly no Thomas Paine) you begin to think again.

As I mentioned in the Introduction, Billy Bragg said recently that capitalism is like fire: controlled it can give you heat and light and energy; but uncontrolled it will consume and destroy everything in its path. I fear that the same can be said for technology. When the only limit to what can be invented is what can be imagined, we are left with only ethics and morals to guide us. And I’m not at all convinced about Mark Zuckerberg’s. According to academic David Runciman, Facebook ‘is both the most and least democratic thing ever, a community of 2 billion people that is the plaything of a thirty-something billionaire. It makes no sense.’ James Ball in Prospect magazine suggests that the internet ‘poses the biggest threat of monopoly in a century’ and cites how America dealt with the threat of a rail monopoly by the Sherman Anti-Trust Laws and Teddy Roosevelt’s actions as a trust-buster back when America (and the West) was rightly mistrustful of big business rather than in thrall to it.

But we are getting wise. In America, the genie is out of the bottle because of Elizabeth Warren. I think one day soon maybe one of them will be broken up.’ Elizabeth Warren, who as I write is the Democrat’s favourite contender to unseat Trump, may well be the next president of the United States. Mark Zuckerberg will probably do everything in his murky, data-harvesting, email-leaking, algorithmic power to stop her though. As Paul Mason says, she has the tech giants in her sights. ‘Today’s big tech companies have too much power – too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else.’


pages: 416 words: 112,268

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

In response to any mention of risks from advanced AI, one is likely to hear, “What about the benefits of AI?” For example, here is Oren Etzioni:18 Doom-and-gloom predictions often fail to consider the potential benefits of AI in preventing medical errors, reducing car accidents, and more. And here is Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, in a recent media-fueled exchange with Elon Musk:19 If you’re arguing against AI, then you’re arguing against safer cars that aren’t going to have accidents and you’re arguing against being able to better diagnose people when they’re sick. Leaving aside the tribal notion that anyone mentioning risks is “against AI,” both Zuckerberg and Etzioni are arguing that to talk about risks is to ignore the potential benefits of AI or even to negate them.

., “Human-level performance in first-person multiplayer games with population-based deep reinforcement learning,” arXiv:1807.01281 (2018). 48. A view of AI progress over the next few years: Peter Stone et al., “Artificial intelligence and life in 2030,” One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, report of the 2015 Study Panel, 2016. 49. The media-fueled argument between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg: Peter Holley, “Billionaire burn: Musk says Zuckerberg’s understanding of AI threat ‘is limited,’” The Washington Post, July 25, 2017. 50. On the value of search engines to individual users: Erik Brynjolfsson, Felix Eggers, and Avinash Gannamaneni, “Using massive online choice experiments to measure changes in well-being,” working paper no. 24514, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2018. 51.

In his analysis he argues that anyone who expects superhuman AI to take more than twenty-five years—which includes this author as well as Nick Bostrom—is not concerned about the risks of AI. 19. A news article with quotations from the Musk–Zuckerberg “debate”: Alanna Petroff, “Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg’s understanding of AI is ‘limited,’” CNN Money, July 25, 2017. 20. In 2015 the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation organized a debate titled “Are super intelligent computers really a threat to humanity?” Robert Atkinson, director of the foundation, suggests that mentioning risks is likely to result in reduced funding for AI.


pages: 361 words: 107,461

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

The great irony, of course, is that the history of modern entrepreneurship is littered with the stories of founders whose success we roundly celebrate today but whose loved ones worried in the beginning about the same thing that Jim did—that they’d waste their lives—but only if they did take that leap in pursuit of their ideas. When Steve Jobs and Bill Gates dropped out of college in 1972 and 1975, respectively, to go on to found Apple and Microsoft, you can be sure their parents weren’t high-fiving and sleeping soundly those first years, just as Mark Zuckerberg’s parents weren’t a generation later when he left school to start Facebook. Or Evan Williams’s parents, when he left the University of Nebraska after a year and a half to work in the nascent tech startup sector before eventually founding Blogger and Twitter and then Medium. Leaving a stable, well-paying career or dropping out of a prestigious university has simply never been something you did if you wanted to be successful in life, even if you did have a world-altering idea.

The Hangover finished its first week at $70 million, landed at number one for a second weekend in a row, and then went on to complete its unheard-of (for modern comedies) six-month theatrical run that netted more than $275 million at the box office in the United States alone. Two years before The Hangover came out, during the announcement of a new Facebook user-centered advertising program, Mark Zuckerberg told an assembled group of tech journalists and advertisers that “nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend.” The Hangover franchise would prove Zuckerberg correct over the next several years. It developed such a loyal fan base that today the first two films in the series are two of the top ten highest-grossing R-rated films of all time, with more than $1 billion in ticket sales between them worldwide.

See ideas; luck; privilege Oprah Winfrey Show, 8–9, 122 organic growth Airbnb, 60–61 Carol’s Daughter products, 9 vs. professional money, 244 for Stacy’s Pita Chips, 184 See also specific companies by name Original Cookie Company, 77 origin stories, 63 other people’s money (OPM), 74–75 See also professional money Outdoor Voices, 151 ownership employee stock ownership plan, 259 partner threats, 167–68 patents and intellectual property rights, 160–68 See also professional money P Page, Larry, xii Panera Bread, 77, 269 Pao, Ellen, 227 parental influence on Bill Gates, 18 on Daymond John, 29, 74–75 on Eric Ryan, 45 on Gary Erickson, 90 on Gary Hirshberg, 139–40 on Jane Wurwand, 30 on Jim Koch, 15–16 on Lara Merriken, 91 on Lisa Price, 6–7 on Mark Zuckerberg, 18 on Michael Dell, 18–20 on Ron Shaich, 79 on Steve Jobs, 18 worry and concern, 18 Parsons, Richard, 239 partnerships buying out a partner, 245–47 conflict in, post-merger, 238–39 importance of, 42–50 resolving issues in, 234–38 tension in, 222–31 See also co-founders passion Adam Lowry on, 47 Alice Waters on, 210 vs. attention, 116 bootstrapping and, 61–62 definitions, 11 ideas and, 8–9 Lisa Price on, 7–9, 11 Michael Dell on, 19–20 Steve Wasserman on, 244 Stewart Butterfield on, 187 vs. utility, 10 Whitney Wolfe on, 67 See also money vs. deeper purpose Patagonia, 260–64 patents, protecting, 160–68 paternity leave, 261 Paulson, John, 15 Peloton, 270 PepsiCo, 184 perfectionism, 87–88 Perkins, Melanie, 155–56 perspective, 145, 267 Phillips, John, 108 Pierson, Rich, 200–201 Pinterest, 215 Pipkin, Chet, 216–17, 270 pitfalls of monarch CEOs, 205–8 in product development, 87–88 research and, 38 scaling of business vs. you, 186, 200–201, 212 of startup to CEO transition, 243–44 See also crisis management pivots, 180–90 examples of, 186–87 for Slack, 187–90 speed of, 180–81 for Stacy’s Pita Chips, 181–84 for Twitch, 185–86 PowerBar, 245 Price, Lisa brand building, 122 on business growth, 8–10 entrepreneurial success of, 12 on idea for Carol’s Daughter, 4–7 partnership and, 43 on problem solving, 11 Prince, as inspiration, 5, 11 privilege, 79–83, 270 problem solving Alli Webb on, 134 Chet Pipkin on, 217–18 Daymond John on, 26 ideas and, 8, 10–11 Michael Dell and, 21 Tobi Lütke on, 107 by Tristan Walker, 154 Tristan Walker on, 152 Whitney Wolfe on, 69–70 Procter & Gamble, 51, 63–64, 157 product development.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Social media platforms are in a race to accumulate profits, corner market share, ship products and services before their competitors, and extract data from as many users as possible. Ensuring the security of their users, and of their users’ data, is largely an afterthought. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s flippant mantra “move fast and break things” fully embodies this negligence. To be sure, data security is not entirely ignored. But security is prioritized only to the extent that it makes sense from a business perspective, that it helps mitigate some kind of liability. Fortunately for many digital companies, liabilities are light and entirely manageable relative to the monumental revenues.

* * * In 2018, a new term circulated widely: “techlash” — not only a growing irritation with social media’s ill effects but a major pushback against the entire roster of technology platforms. Let’s face it: people are fed up with social media. Just about everyone has some kind of complaint, not just about the applications or the platforms, but also about the billionaire executives who run it all, people like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard friends and family members complain, Twitter is a Dumpster fire! Or, I can’t stand Facebook! Zuckerberg is creepy! And yet, everywhere I look, I see the same people still glued to their devices. Numbers bear it out too. In February 2020, the Economist reported that “in the past 12 months the shares of America’s five biggest technology firms have been on an astonishing bull run, rising by 52%.”103 Facebook was notoriously fined $5 billion by the U.S.

The goal is to have business executives acknowledge certain principles and govern their business practices accordingly, but without any kind of specific enforcement mechanism to hold them to their promises. It’s easy to be cynical and dismiss corporate social responsibility principles as futile, especially when companies so often and flagrantly abuse them. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly made promises to be more responsible and protect users’ privacy (usually in response to some scandal). We hear you, and understand we need to do better. He’s even advocated for certain types of regulation, which he says the company would welcome. You’d be naive to think these statements are not calculated to ward off what Facebook considers to be undesirable laws, and to channel regulation in directions that benefit Facebook.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Some also point to an ongoing war for tech hegemony, mostly between the US and China, where excessive restrictions on US companies could make them lose this fight. I had the opportunity to meet all the leaders of these Big Tech companies over the last years and to follow many of them closely in their journey toward success. For example, I visited Mark Zuckerberg in a warehouse in Palo Alto, when he had just 18 employees, and designated Jack Ma a World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader” when he had just started Alibaba. I am convinced that they, after an initial period of feeling perhaps a bit like Alice in Wonderland, have become increasingly aware of the enormous impact they have on individuals’ lives and identities.

He laid out four principles that he believed should guide legislation in the United States, which lacked rules similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation: minimum personal data use, the “right to know” who uses your data, the “right to access” your data, and the “right to data security,” “without which trust is impossible.” In 2020 Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg joined the chorus to ask for regulation. He suggested the European Commission look at implementing tighter rules on political advertising, the portability of user data, and the oversight over tech companies like his, so regulation could “hold companies accountable when they make mistakes.”28 But importantly, he also supported new rules on taxation: “Tech companies should serve society,” he wrote.

., November 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/11/15/13631938/benioff-salesforce-data-government-federal-trade-commission-ftc-linkedin-microsoft. 26 Trailblazer, Marc Benioff, October 2019, pp. 12–13. 27 “You Deserve Privacy Online. Here's How You Could Actually Get It,” Tim Cook, TIME Magazine, January 2019, https://time.com/collection/davos-2019/5502591/tim-cook-data-privacy/. 28 “Big Tech Needs More Regulation,” Mark Zuckerberg, Financial Times, February 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/602ec7ec-4f18-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5. 29 “Benioff Comes Out Strong for Homeless Initiative, although Salesforce Would Pay Big,” Kevin Fagan, San Francisco Chronicle, October 2018, https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Benioff-comes-out-strong-for-homeless-initiative-13291392.php. 30 “The Social Responsibility of Business,” Marc Benioff, The New York Times, October 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/business-social-responsibility-proposition-c.html. 31 “We can now measure the progress of stakeholder capitalism.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Some also point to an ongoing war for tech hegemony, mostly between the US and China, where excessive restrictions on US companies could make them lose this fight. I had the opportunity to meet all the leaders of these Big Tech companies over the last years and to follow many of them closely in their journey toward success. For example, I visited Mark Zuckerberg in a warehouse in Palo Alto, when he had just 18 employees, and designated Jack Ma a World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader” when he had just started Alibaba. I am convinced that they, after an initial period of feeling perhaps a bit like Alice in Wonderland, have become increasingly aware of the enormous impact they have on individuals’ lives and identities.

He laid out four principles that he believed should guide legislation in the United States, which lacked rules similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation: minimum personal data use, the “right to know” who uses your data, the “right to access” your data, and the “right to data security,” “without which trust is impossible.” In 2020 Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg joined the chorus to ask for regulation. He suggested the European Commission look at implementing tighter rules on political advertising, the portability of user data, and the oversight over tech companies like his, so regulation could “hold companies accountable when they make mistakes.”28 But importantly, he also supported new rules on taxation: “Tech companies should serve society,” he wrote.

., November 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/11/15/13631938/benioff-salesforce-data-government-federal-trade-commission-ftc-linkedin-microsoft. 26 Trailblazer, Marc Benioff, October 2019, pp. 12–13. 27 “You Deserve Privacy Online. Here's How You Could Actually Get It,” Tim Cook, TIME Magazine, January 2019, https://time.com/collection/davos-2019/5502591/tim-cook-data-privacy/. 28 “Big Tech Needs More Regulation,” Mark Zuckerberg, Financial Times, February 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/602ec7ec-4f18-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5. 29 “Benioff Comes Out Strong for Homeless Initiative, although Salesforce Would Pay Big,” Kevin Fagan, San Francisco Chronicle, October 2018, https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Benioff-comes-out-strong-for-homeless-initiative-13291392.php. 30 “The Social Responsibility of Business,” Marc Benioff, The New York Times, October 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/business-social-responsibility-proposition-c.html. 31 “We can now measure the progress of stakeholder capitalism.


pages: 39 words: 9,543

Lying by Sam Harris

Mark Zuckerberg, mental accounting, Socratic dialogue

The boundary between lying and deception is often vague. In fact, it is even possible to deceive with the truth. I could, for instance, stand on the sidewalk in front of the White House and call the headquarters of Facebook on my cellphone: “Hello, this is Sam Harris. I’m calling from the White House, and I’d like to speak to Mark Zuckerberg.” My words would, in a narrow sense, be true—but the statement seems calculated to deceive. Would I be lying? Close enough. To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.[2] This leaves stage magicians, poker players, and other harmless dissemblers off the hook, while illuminating a psychological and social landscape whose general shape is very easy to recognize.


pages: 217 words: 63,287

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

That pink is the dust off the desert. It’s real. When you know that, it changes everything.” The rise of social economics 1. Generation why “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook When Sergey Brin and Larry Page first set-up Google in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park in the autumn of 1998, they were very clear why they were doing it: “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” They also had a great tool to achieve this: a search engine they had developed while they were PhD students, which used very different algorithms to any other on the market.

On 3 April 2012, Instagram released a version of the app for the Android operating system, opening it up for the first time to non-iPhone users. On that first day alone, more than a million copies were downloaded, pushing its overall user base to over 30 million. Just seven days after the Android release, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced that his company was buying Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock, rocketing Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram’s two twenty-something founders, into the super-rich list overnight. Start-up to billion-dollar buyout in under two years – it was a dizzying tale of success.


pages: 700 words: 160,604

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

That offered many advantages, one of which was that people tended to underestimate her. On the other hand, she had never been a CEO, so she had some learning to do. That led her to join a local professional development group for young CEOs, the Alliance of Chief Executives, which met for a half-day each month to share problems and solutions. It’s hard to imagine Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg joining such a support group, but Haurwitz, like her mentor Doudna, had a self-awareness and humility not usually found among alpha males. Among other things, her Alliance group coached her on how to create a team with different types of expertise. Today the mere appearance of the word CRISPR in a prospectus is enough to cause venture capitalists to go into heat.

Part of the goal of the Des Moines enrichment programs was to help students do projects to compete in the Intel Science Search, a national competition. Zhang’s virus experiment won him third place, which carried a hefty $50,000 prize. He used it to help pay his tuition when he got into Harvard in 2000. Harvard and Stanford Zhang was at Harvard at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg, and it’s interesting to speculate on which of them will end up having the most impact on the world. It’s a proxy for the larger question, which future historians will answer, of whether the digital revolution or the life-science revolution will end up being the more important. Majoring in both chemistry and physics, Zhang initially did research with Don Wiley, a crystallographer who was a master at determining the structure of complex molecules.

The citation heralded them “for harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes.” The prize, which carries a $3 million award for each recipient, had been established a year earlier by the Russian billionaire and early Facebook funder Yuri Milner, along with Sergey Brin of Google, Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Milner, an ebullient fanboy of scientists, staged a glittering televised award ceremony that infused the glory of science with some of the glamor of Hollywood. The 2014 black-tie event, cohosted by Vanity Fair, was held in a spacecraft hangar at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley.


pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

Between 1975 and 2015 real US GDP - the size of the economy adjusted for inflation - roughly tripled from $5.49 trillion to $16.58 trillion.11 During this period, productivity grew by more than 60 per cent. Yet from 1979 onwards, real hourly wages for the great majority of American workers have stagnated or even fallen.12 In other words, for almost four decades a tiny elite has captured nearly all the gains from an expanding economy. You do not have to look far to see who is in that elite. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard at the age of nineteen to launch Facebook. He is now in his early thirties. According to Forbes,13 Zuckerberg's fortune increased by $18 billion in the year to mid-2016, making his current total estimated worth $70.8 billion. He is the fourth-richest man in the US and the fifth-richest in the world.14 It defies reason to maintain, as the dominant narrative does, that the inequality that has increased in the US, and in many other economies, is due to very smart individuals doing particularly well in innovative sectors.

The ingenuity of these people has undoubtedly been instrumental in changing how we communicate, transact business and live our lives. Their products and services epitomize our contemporary idea of progress. Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs are often viewed as heroic do-gooders. Indeed, Google's stated mission is Do No Evil. In April 2016 a front cover of the Economist showed the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg dressed like a Roman emperor under the headline ‘Imperial Ambition'. Meanwhile, innovation is seen as the new force in modern capitalism, not just in Silicon Valley but globally. Phrases like the ‘new economy', ‘the innovation economy', ‘the information society' or ‘smart growth' encapsulate the idea that it is entrepreneurs, garage tinkerers and their patents that unleash the ‘creative destruction' from which the jobs of the future come.

Peter Bach's interactive calculator can be accessed at www.drugabacus.org 9. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/silicon-valleys-secessionists.html 10. Plato, The Republic, translated and with an Introduction by H. D. P. Lee (London: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 115. 11. http://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation-adjusted/table. 12. http://www.epi.org/publication/stagnant-wages-in-2014/ 13. http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiasavchuk/2016/05/25/mark-zuckerberg-makes-18-billion-in-a-year-now-richest-person-in-california-facebook-billionaire/#490a62e5479c 14. Forbes, 2017. INTRODUCTION: MAKING VERSUS TAKING 1. Bill Haywood, Bill Haywood's Book: The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood (New York: International Publishers, 1929). 2. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/25/bhs-philip-green-family-millions-administration-arcadia 3. https://www.ft.com/content/cc58c190-6ec3-11e6-a0c9-1365ce54b926 4. https://www.ft.com/content/3e0172a0-6e1b-11e6-9ac1-1055824ca907 5. http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GDP.pdf 6.


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

Durov’s story shows how the Kremlin evolved from its classic model of surveillance and intimidation, which had proved to be ill-suited to the internet, to one of filters and blacklists, intentionally modelled on the Great Firewall and helped along by its creators. Like Facebook, VKontakte was the product of a tech prodigy studying at an elite college. Durov, like Mark Zuckerberg, was born in 1984, and got his start developing apps and websites for his fellow students at Saint Petersburg State University. A friend who was studying in the US at the time, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, showed Durov Facebook, and the two quickly realised the potential for a Russian copycat service.

Like Baidu, which overtook Google in China in part by helping users search for illegal MP3s, VK was a hub for finding and sharing copyrighted materials, becoming one of the largest violators of intellectual property in the world.5 This didn’t win it any favours with the motion picture or recording industries, but it gave it an edge with users that Facebook simply couldn’t match. By July 2007, there were more than 1 million VK accounts.6 As VK’s userbase ballooned, Durov became an internet celebrity, courted by both the foreign press and the Kremlin as ‘Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg’. Initially press shy, with money and fame came a reputation for cockiness, even arrogance. In the most famous incident, Durov challenged an employee to throw his cash bonus out of a window of the company’s swanky St Petersburg headquarters. As pink 5,000 rouble notes (worth around $157 at the time), folded into paper aeroplanes, floated down onto the street below, a large crowd gathered and scuffles broke out.7 The paper plane throwing was widely covered in the Russian and foreign press, increasing Durov’s notoriety.

The following year, Twitter hired its first ever managing director for China, Kathy Chen, a former employee of the People’s Liberation Army and China’s Ministry of Public Security, who in her first act as company executive posted a public message to Chinese state media saying: “Let’s work together to tell great China [sic] story to the world!”11 Chen left the company eight months later after Twitter struggled to make any headway and moved its China ad sales team to Singapore.12 No company has been more shameless in its attempts to woo Beijing than Facebook. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has posed for photos running in the Beijing smog, given employees copies of Xi Jinping’s On the Governance of China, and even reportedly asked Xi to name his first child (Xi declined). According to The New York Times, Facebook also developed a confidential internal tool to suppress posts from appearing in users’ news feeds in specific countries, which employees who spoke to the paper said was designed to help Facebook get into China.13 Asked to respond to the news, Facebook would only say: “We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country.”


pages: 412 words: 115,048

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. found it difficult to imagine such an agenda being pushed by these leftists’ “activist counterparts in the sixties, who defined themselves through their adversarial relations to authority and its institutions.” Now, writes Gates, “the aim is not to resist power, but to enlist power.”16 It is not just governments that are being asked to censor. As of early June 2020, many Facebook employees were in revolt against their CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, for not removing Donald Trump’s inflammatory postings.17 This misplaced trust in institutions to censor in the public interest has received an assist from a “What’s the big deal?” outlook emerging from some of the more rarified confines of the ivory tower. Starting with the work of Michel Foucault and followed up by a stream of academics, the idea is that censorship is not merely something enforced by authorities; it’s also hardwired into the oppressive power dynamics of everyday life, communication, and thought formation—including what Frederick Schauer calls “the ways some discourses marginalize others by displacing them” and what Ruth Gavison identifies as “self-restraint by speakers themselves, a variety of market devices [and] social implementation of norms of unacceptability.”18 That does not leave much out.

Yet they decide which of their billions of users will be heard and by whom, and which will not. That abuses occur countless times daily can be no surprise. They are built into the system. It comes down to money—what the technology writer Charlie Warzel calls the “original sin” of Big Tech’s prioritization of growth over the interests of users.58 When an aging senator asked Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 how the platform can be free to users, Zuckerberg replied (to snickers worldwide), “Senator, we run ads.” He might have also explained to the befuddled politician that the ads don’t work like those in paper publications: platforms curate and promote content for maximum “engagement,” that is, the intensity and frequency with which users interact with them.

Charlie Warzel, “Big Tech Was Designed to Be Toxic,” New York Times, April 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/opinion/facebook-youtube-disinformation.html. 59. Sean Burch, “‘Senator, We Run Ads’: Hatch Mocked for Basic Facebook Question to Zuckerberg,” The Wrap, April 10, 2018, https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/mark-zuckerberg-gives-orrin-hatch-quick-explainer-facebook-202404519.html; Jeff Gary and Ashkan Soltani, “First Things First: Online Advertising Practices and Their Effects on Platform Speech,” Knight First Amendment Institute, August 21, 2019, https://knightcolumbia.org/content/first-things-first-online-advertising-practices-and-their-effects-on-platform-speech. 60.


Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

When Katherine Johnson calculated orbital paths, I imagine she saw multidimensional patterns in her brilliant mind. What is the profit in holding back any student with clear aptitude beyond their grade level? What if we routinely let students who love math double down by increasing their math courses or taking classes at local colleges? Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk all dropped out of college or graduate programs. They were eager to test and apply their advanced skills in the marketplace, heading straight for Silicon Valley. But in Jobs’s case, at least, there was also a desire to skirt required courses in which he had no interest. I would wager that the curriculum on offer just wasn’t challenging enough for any of them.

They can develop, refine, and market an idea but cannot originate it. Of the five major tech companies, four started as a garage operation or in a college dorm room, with two brilliant minds tinkering and dreaming together: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple, Bill Gates and Paul Allen created Microsoft, Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google, and Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin created Facebook. In the late 1930s, the Sperry Corporation hired two brothers, Russell and Sigurd Varian, who exemplify the concept of complementary minds. Sigurd was a thrill seeker who dropped out of college, reportedly due to boredom, not unlike Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Musk.

In a profile on him in Business Insider, Thiel says that in Silicon Valley many of the successful entrepreneurs are on the spectrum, which “happens to be a plus for innovation and creating great companies.” In hiring, he says, he avoids MBAs, whom he describes as high-extrovert/low-conviction people, with a combination of traits that leads toward “extremely herd-like thinking and behavior.” Many people consider Mark Zuckerberg to be on the Asperger’s spectrum. He has been described as robotic, socially awkward, and intensely single-minded. According to McFarland, Zuckerberg “wears a gray T-shirt every day, saying he wants to focus his decision-making energy on Facebook not fashion.” Some consider him a genius for having invented the world’s largest social network.


pages: 396 words: 113,613

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

Facebook, which has a similar playbook but focused on social media rather than search, had even higher returns—a ludicrous 50 percent.11 In a competitive market, publishers would sell their ads elsewhere. But the Google-Facebook duopoly gives them no such choice. Facebook’s strategy has also focused on integration, though more horizontal than vertical. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in a 2008 email, “It is better to buy than compete.” That’s why it paid $1 billion in 2012 for Instagram, then a tiny company with thirteen employees. It snapped up WhatsApp for $19 billion just two years later. At the time these were jaw-dropping prices, but the acquisitions soon came to make sense.

Some of those works turn out to be valuable in the marketplace, but a copyright doesn’t grant market power by default. When copyrights are aggregated on an industrial scale, however, they bestow the power to shape markets. One of the few antitrust violations still enforced by regulators is “maintenance of monopoly,” or taking actions in the market to ensure that no one can compete with you. This is why Mark Zuckerberg is in so much trouble for admitting that Facebook acquired Instagram so that he could continue to dominate the digital lives of the millions of Facebook users who were bailing on FB and joining Insta. But there’s no rule against maintaining your copyright monopoly. An antitrust regulator won’t punish UMG for “defending their copyrights,” even if that makes their market monopoly more pervasive and powerful.

If it wants to avoid YouTube becoming another MySpace, it needs stronger fortifications—ones that lock customers in and competitors out. That’s what Warren Buffett is looking for as he seeks out “economic castles protected by unbreachable moats.”45 With help from the European Union, Google might have found its best moat yet. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once observed, “It is better to buy than to compete.”46 Big businesses know it’s better to comply with expensive regulation than to compete too. While they naturally prefer power without responsibility, power with responsibility can be almost as good. The Bell Telephone Company was once entitled to go to your house, inspect the device you had plugged into your phone line, and, if it came from a competitor and you refused to remove it, to cut off your service.47 That allowed it to transform its state-bestowed right to regulate the telephone utility into a state-backed right to control its competition.


pages: 271 words: 62,538

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter) by Golden Krishna

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, computer vision, crossover SUV, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, impulse control, Inbox Zero, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, microdosing, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, QR code, RFID, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator, Y2K

This is the first sentence of a 2013 Facebook researcher’s Facebook post about her team’s news feed findings.11 The stream of thoughts, images, videos, and links your friends and advertisers share with you is at the core of the Facebook experience and can even alter your mood.12 According to her team’s research, the resounding feedback from people using their web service was that important and interesting content was buried in a cluttered feed of stories they were less interested in reading. They redesigned. They used tools to prioritize which things you’d be interested in reading, what people you communicate with most often, and what kinds of imagery you’ll likely enjoy. The redesigned news feed was what Mark Zuckerberg called a “personalized newspaper.”13 A new design filled with more valuable content from friends also calls out sites that are more pertinent to your interests. Then, Facebook reversed course. The new design disappeared. Dustin Curtis, a technology writer and entrepreneur, reported that sources inside Facebook told him that the reversal occurred because people visiting the website on their desktop computers were, well, too efficient.14 They were discovering what they wanted at Facebook, felt satisfied, and left the site faster than ever before.

note_id=10151359587673920 12 Robinson Meyer, “Everything We Know About Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment,” The Atlantic, June 28, 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/ 13 “Facebook has announced a redesigned News Feed that separates streams of content into multiple categories and optimizes the user interface with a ‘mobile-inspired’ design. Describing the goal of News Feed as providing a ‘personalized newspaper,’ Mark Zuckerberg says it’s being changed to take advantage of more photo and other visual content sharing, as well as the difference between personal stories and posts from public figures.” Adi Robertson, “Facebook Redesigns News Feed with Multiple Feeds and ‘Mobile-Inspired’ Interface,” The Verge, March 7, 2013. http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/7/4075548/facebook-redesigns-news-feed-with-multiple-feeds 14 “After an investigation into the problem by Facebook’s data team, they discovered that the new News Feed was performing too well.


pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

It embraces values of rebellion, drawing from a loose set of attitudes sometimes called the hacker ethic. Facebook’s headquarters are at “One Hacker Way” and it has the word HACK laid out in 12-meter letters in the stone. The company’s mantra until last year was “move fast and break things,” and Mark Zuckerberg recently explained to potential investors: “Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it—often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.” Internet culture also believes that the Internet itself is a key to building a better world.

Brian Chesky writes that “At Airbnb, we are creating a door to an open world—where everyone’s at home and can belong, anywhere.” Openness is almost a synonym for sharing, for a kind of exchange that goes beyond straightforward market transactions; it is central both to the broader appeal of the Sharing Economy and to the story that Airbnb tells about itself. ­Chesky’s words echo those of Mark Zuckerberg, who started a letter to potential Facebook investors this way: “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected . . . As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use.


pages: 247 words: 69,593

The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time by Allen Gannett

Alfred Russel Wallace, collective bargaining, content marketing, data science, David Brooks, deliberate practice, Desert Island Discs, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gentrification, glass ceiling, iterative process, lone genius, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, pattern recognition, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, work culture

Ting once told a BBC interviewer, “What Facebook did that was incredibly smart was to hook them with the friending and the poking, and then they learned with their users, and added functionality slowly over time as users became more comfortable.” In essence, without necessarily being aware of what they were doing, Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook team were following the creative curve. They were balancing the familiar with the novel. Something too novel risked scaring people off—whereas something too familiar wouldn’t drive any interest. In David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect, Zuckerberg is quoted as telling the author that “the trick isn’t adding stuff, it’s taking away.”

That is why many luxury brands focus on exclusivity, maximizing price to grow revenues rather than distribution. The only other way to avoid the curve is to make your product addictive (think of the staying power of coffee or certain videogames). Yet, how did the Beatles know how much sitar to use in their music? Alternately, how did Mark Zuckerberg know which features to take away from the earliest versions of Facebook? Here is where my interviews became critical. I sat down with dozens of successful creatives from numerous fields. My goal was to understand how they managed to generate one idea after another at the sweet spot of the creative curve.


pages: 62 words: 13,939

Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Mark Zuckerberg, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. ● ● ● Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. Mark Zuckerberg was misunderstood when he introduced the newsfeed and turned down a billion dollars. Steve Jobs was misunderstood, and Cory Booker, and Richard Branson, and David Simon, and Kanye West. If you’re not being misunderstood, then you’re not shattering the status quo. Michael Karnjanaprakorn ● ● ● I suppose no man can violate his nature.


pages: 47 words: 13,450

Misfits: A Personal Manifesto by Michaela Coel

fake news, Mark Zuckerberg, period drama

I’ve decided to embrace as many perspectives as I can, and be brave enough to update my beliefs, and discover I’m not always right. What a brilliant thing, to discover we’ve been wrong about some things, what a brilliant thing it is to grow. We’re all gonna die. Instead of standing here, wishing for the good ol’ glory days, about the way life used to be before Mark Zuckerberg graduated, I’m going to try to be my best; to be transparent; and to play whatever part I can to help fix this house. What part will you play? “There are as many perspectives as there are people.” Colin Wright EPILOGUE The Aftermoth JUNE 2021 I write this three years on from the lecture, and I’m still often asked about its aftermath.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

Empowering Humanity.”4 A couple years later, Smith’s colleagues at Google began working to deliver WiFi through solar-powered balloons. CEO Larry Page says, “Two out of three people in the world don’t have good Internet access now. We actually think [balloon-delivered Internet] can really help people.”5 Not to be outdone, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced Internet.org in 2013. “We’ve been working on ways to beam internet to people from the sky,” he posted.6 He wants to reach remote places with infrared lasers and high-altitude drones. That tech giants are messianic about their creations is no surprise. But their outlook has possessed powerful people outside of Silicon Valley, too.

It cited the 85,000 people who had pledged on Facebook that they would march.36 Days after the first protest in Tahrir Square, Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times, “The Facebook-armed youth of Tunisia and Egypt rise to demonstrate the liberating power of social media.”37 One Egyptian newspaper reported that a man named his firstborn daughter Facebook.38 On February 11, 2011 – the day the regime folded – Ghonim told a CNN interviewer, “I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him. . . . This revolution started on Facebook . . . in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I’ve always said that if you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.”39 If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.

Asocial Enterprises Prahalad has had some influence in corporate circles, but it’s a variation of his idea called “social enterprise” that has really taken off. In business schools, engineering departments, and venture capital firms, social enterprises – start-up businesses that try to serve a social good through a viable business – are all the rage. Social entrepreneurs model themselves on the Steve Jobses and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, not realizing that successful businesses are successful because they have carefully chosen their customers, not because they have a foolproof Midas touch. Apple is a profitable company not just because it designs superior products but also because it chooses the world’s wealthiest people as its market.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

A psychologist has conducted experiments suggesting that a “dominant search engine could alter perceptions of candidates in close elections.”92 Jonathan Zittrain spells out how known technology at a dominant social network could have an even more insidious effect: Consider a hypothetical, hotly contested future election. Suppose that Mark Zuckerberg personally favors whichever candidate you don’t like. He arranges for a voting prompt to appear within the newsfeeds of tens of millions of active Facebook users. . . . Zuckerberg makes use of the fact that Facebook “likes” can predict political views and party affiliation, even beyond the many users who proudly advertise those affiliations directly.

Google Annual Form 10-K Report for 2009 (fi led with United States Securities and Exchange Commission on February 12, 2010). Available at http:// google.client.shareholder.com /secfiling.cfm?filingid=1193125-10 -30774. 52. The same dynamic may be happening in dominant social networks as well. For example, one young developer wrote a heartfelt “Letter to Mark Zuckerberg,” complaining that he felt trapped by a meeting with the site’s acquisition team: he could either sell his app to the company, or risk being cut off from customers after Facebook developed its own version. Pay-for-prominence arrangements are also worrisome because of the overbearing power of the dominant platform.

Cathy O’Neil, “When Accurate Modeling Is Not Good,” Mathbabe (blog), December 12, 2012, http://mathbabe.org/2012/12/12/when-accurate -modeling-is-not-good/ (analyzing the work of a casino CEO concerned with predictive analytics). 125. Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011); Senator Dick Durbin, Letter to Mark Zuckerberg, February 2011. Available at http://www.durbin.senate.gov/public/index .cfm /files/serve?File _id=ec32a7a8-4671-4ab9-b5f4-9c0b9736deae. (“Facebook does not allow democracy and human rights activists in repressive regimes to use Facebook anonymously.”) 126. On a cost-per-impression or cost-per-click basis.


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This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Once they saw the web’s market potential, Microsoft hacked together its own web browser—Internet Explorer—cobbled together a quick and dirty web server, and aggressively pushed web providers to choose Microsoft over Netscape. This was before Gates became a philanthropic saint. He was firing off emails to AOL executives, demanding to know: “How much do we have to pay you to screw Netscape?” In the rush to best Netscape, speed, not security, was the name of the game. More than a decade later, Mark Zuckerberg would coin a name for this approach at Facebook with his motto “Move fast and break things.” Just as soon as these products hit the market, hackers began unspooling them with glee. They wanted to see how far the bugs in their new internet toys could take them—which, as it turned out, was quite far.

She printed the email, sprinted over to Facebook’s head of product security, and told him to deal with it. Alex Rice, a freckled engineer in his early thirties, took one look at the email and was impressed, both by the bug and by Sandberg’s hustle. Facebook’s competitor at the time, MySpace, had a history of aggressively prosecuting hackers who pointed out bugs in its site. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took the opposite approach. Zuckerberg considered himself a hacker. He sponsored all-night hackathons and made a point of engaging with—and in many cases hiring—anyone who came forward with a serious bug. Facebook’s 2012 IPO prospectus was part SEC regulatory filing, part dreamy love note to hackers the world over.

Part of the problem is the economy still rewards the first to market. Whoever gets their widget to market with the most features before the competition wins. But speed has always been the natural enemy of good security design. Our current model penalizes products with the most secure, fully vetted software. And yet, the “move fast and break things” mantra Mark Zuckerberg pushed in Facebook’s earliest days has failed us time and time again. The annual cost from cyber losses now eclipses those from terrorism. In 2018, terrorist attacks cost the global economy $33 billion, a decrease of thirty-eight percent from the previous year. That same year, a study by RAND Corporation from more than 550 sources—the most comprehensive data analysis of its kind—concluded global losses from cyberattacks were likely on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.


Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

Unless you have strong evidence that distraction is important for your specific profession, you’re best served, for the reasons argued earlier in this chapter, by giving serious consideration to depth. Chapter Two Deep Work Is Rare In 2012, Facebook unveiled the plans for a new headquarters designed by Frank Gehry. At the center of this new building is what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “the largest open floor plan in the world”: More than three thousand employees will work on movable furniture spread over a ten-acre expanse. Facebook, of course, is not the only Silicon Valley heavyweight to embrace the open office concept. When Jack Dorsey, whom we met at the end of the last chapter, bought the old San Francisco Chronicle building to house Square, he configured the space so that his developers work in common spaces on long shared desks.

Jack Dorsey justified the open layout of the Square headquarters by explaining: “We encourage people to stay out in the open because we believe in serendipity—and people walking by each other teaching new things.” For the sake of discussion, let’s call this principle—that when you allow people to bump into each other smart collaborations and new ideas emerge—the theory of serendipitous creativity. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to build the world’s largest office, we can reasonably conjecture, this theory helped drive his decision, just as it has driven many of the moves toward open workspaces elsewhere in Silicon Valley and beyond. (Other less-exalted factors, like saving money and increasing supervision, also play a role, but they’re not as sexy and are therefore less emphasized.)


pages: 293 words: 78,439

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Google then expanded its inventory by taking over the advertising of other publishers through its AdSense program. A range of innovations led the company’s revenues and advertisements to soar. As of the writing of this book, Alphabet is worth almost a half-trillion dollars. Facebook. Similarly, when Mark Zuckerberg launched the first version of the social network in 2004, it looked as if he was a bit late to the party, with Myspace as the clearly established market leader. Zuckerberg started Facebook at Harvard and expanded it to the Ivy League schools and then to all schools before finally opening it to the public.

In 2006 the popular press got wind of a rapidly growing trend among high school and college students: the use of what we now know as social networks. News Corp septuagenarian Rupert Murdoch shocked the industry by paying $580 million for social media pioneer Myspace. That move ended up being a boon to then twenty-four-year-old Mark Zuckerberg by giving him space to continue the relentless growth of Facebook. Turner could look to its cousins in the newspaper business to get a glimpse of the future. Although newspapers still appeared to be on stable financial ground, industry analysts increasingly—and correctly—worried that the industry was about to fall off a cliff.


pages: 269 words: 77,876

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos by Sarah Lacy

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, BRICs, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, Firefox, Great Leap Forward, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, income per capita, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, McMansion, megacity, Network effects, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), paypal mafia, QWERTY keyboard, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

Years ahead of the Beijing lost generation, Robinson wound up here at the end of a Trans-Siberian railroad whim, and he mostly stuck around because he fel in love and had two children “made in China.” It’s home now. Work-wise his latest company uses skil ed Chinese video game artists to build iPhone games. Robinson is wel connected in China’s Web scene, but wil he be the Mark Zuckerberg of China? No way, he says. None of these transplants wil . Most Americans—and the United States—can al just hope to get a piece of this wild ride. Part of that is because the ride is something no one can ful y understand, least of al an American. China’s growth isn’t just about people and factories.

It was started by a young entrepreneur named Ma Huateng, nicknamed Pony Ma because “Ma” is Chinese for horse. Ma is written about daily in the Chinese press, but he almost never gives interviews. While most Internet companies team around Beijing and Shanghai, Tencent is down South with the factories in Shenzhen. It’s not about being the next Mark Zuckerberg; in China, the Web entrepreneur game is about being the next Pony Ma. Tencent’s company store is cal ed the Image Café, and it’s a coded message: “I” is the same sound as the Chinese word for “love,” “Ma” is Pony Ma’s last name, and “Ge” means brother. I love brother Pony. The company has that familiar cocky edge of an Internet darling at its do-no-wrong moment in time.


pages: 243 words: 76,686

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

The festival, which started as an illegal bonfire on Baker Beach in San Francisco in 1986 before moving to Black Rock Desert, has become an attraction for the libertarian tech elite, something Sophie Morris sums up nicely in the title of her piece on the festival: “Burning Man: From far-out freak-fest to corporate schmoozing event.” Mark Zuckerberg famously helicoptered into Burning Man in 2015 to serve grilled cheese sandwiches, while others from the upper echelon of Silicon Valley have enjoyed world-class chefs and air-conditioned yurts. Morris quotes the festival’s director of business and communications, who unflinchingly describes Burning Man as “a little bit like a corporate retreat.

Having worked for an old and widely recognized clothing company, I know firsthand that the pillars of any brand are internal coherence and consistency over time. (That’s literally what we called them at work: “brand pillars.”) For a brand as for a public figure—which, as we now know, any Twitter user can accidentally become overnight—change, ambiguity, and contradiction are anathema. “You have one identity,” Mark Zuckerberg famously said. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He added that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”8 Imagine what Audre Lorde, with all her different selves, would have to say to him


pages: 232 words: 78,701

I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual by Luvvie Ajayi

affirmative action, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, clean water, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, glass ceiling, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Skype, Snapchat, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, upwardly mobile

Well, medically it is. Some people have trouble distinguishing between certain colors. Even scientifically, though, colorblindness does not mean you cannot tell black from white. Random fact for you, if you ever end up on Jeopardy and your Daily Double depends on it: the reason Facebook’s logo is blue is because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind, and shades of blue are the richest ones he can see. THE MORE YOU KNOW *shooting star*. But I bet even Zuck can tell the difference between my skin and his. So for people to sit on some delusional “more evolved” throne and proclaim themselves colorblind, and therefore unable to be prejudiced or racist, is absurd at best, cowardice at medium (yes, medium), and dangerous at worst.

They have gotten rid of things like Facebook Gifts, but they choose to keep this poke thing, which is now the spider monkey that will not let go of our eAnkles. It is a boil on all our asses. The Facebook poke is the never-defined, always-creepy ability to virtually tap on someone’s shoulder or poke them in the who-knows-where-you-want-to-imagine. Mark Zuckerberg and his team of evil world dominators refuse to really answer as to what it’s for, but that doesn’t even matter, because it has taken on its own definition. To poke someone on Facebook is to randomly try to get their attention to flirt. It’s a virtual wink, and like winks, the person who sends one your way makes all the difference in the world.


pages: 296 words: 76,284

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that walking has become en vogue with the biggest tech minds in Silicon Valley. The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs loved to go for walks with friends and business colleagues to discuss ideas, and getting asked to go on a walk in the woods of Palo Alto with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was at one point a rite of passage among Valley stars and potential employees. Twitter cofounder and Square founder Jack Dorsey is also an outspoken believer in the benefits of going for walks. “The best thinking time is just walking,” he has said. He’s not wrong. Studies have shown that the act of walking itself delivers physiological benefits of a higher order, or at least a different kind, than other kinds of physical activity.

Twitter, Zynga, Airbnb, Dropbox: A notable exception to the tech moguls’ fascination with cities is Steve Jobs, who lived and worked his whole life in the suburbs (he lived in a Tudor house in Palo Alto, and Apple’s headquarters were in nearby Cupertino). But when Apple-owned Pixar moved to a new headquarters in Emeryville, California, Jobs pushed the designers to emphasize central locations where employees could mingle with one another with the hope of fostering creativity. Another exception is Mark Zuckerberg, who has built Facebook’s headquarters into a massive campus in Menlo Park, but one that attempts to approximate urbanism, with a walkable commercial strip that includes a dry cleaner, gym, doctor’s office, and various eateries. Zappos, the online shoe giant: Leigh Gallagher, “Tony Hsieh’s New $350 Million Startup,” Fortune.com, January 23, 2012.


pages: 261 words: 71,349

The Introvert Entrepreneur: Amplify Your Strengths and Create Success on Your Own Terms by Beth Buelow

do what you love, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Skype, solopreneur, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh

What many people, including introverts themselves, may not know is that the strengths and traits of the typical introvert—curiosity, desire for depth over breadth, comfort with going solo, thoroughness and introspection, love of research—lend themselves well to entrepreneurship. Introvert entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tony Hsieh, Guy Kawasaki, and others have transformed our lives not by pretending to be extroverts but by applying their introvert strengths to their entrepreneurial endeavors. • • • An introvert trying to be a fake extrovert is just that: a fake extrovert. If you choose to approach your business with that mindset, you won’t solve your problem.

Consider these household names: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Charles Schwab. Steven Spielberg, Michael Jordan, and Julia Roberts. We don’t think of these people as shy underachievers, do we? Yet, they all identify themselves as introverts. There are also the introvert founders of some of the most successful social networking sites: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), and Larry Page (Google). And while I haven’t come across definitive proof, many signs point to President Barack Obama being a member of Team Introvert. What these people have in common is that they have channeled their introvert strengths into superpowers that enable them to succeed in a noisy world.


pages: 257 words: 75,685

Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better by Rob Reich

bread and circuses, effective altruism, end world poverty, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jim Simons, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nick Bostrom, Pareto efficiency, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, supervolcano, time value of money, William MacAskill

Some attack donor discretion and argue that philanthropy is better conceived as reparative justice.19 Others argue that certain kinds of public good production should not be outsourced to private parties and must be produced and funded collectively, by citizens, if the goods 152 C H A P TE R 4 are to possess the stamp of democratic legitimacy they are said to need.20 Still others see in the evolution of philanthropy the emergence of a particular kind of high-profile philanthropist, such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Michael Bloomberg, whose activity supplants the state, subverts public policy processes, and in so doing diminishes democracy.21 I find many points of agreement, especially when considering the actual grant-making practices of foundations today. Yet despite all this, I think a role for foundations in democracy can be defended.

In 2017, six of the top ten recipients of charitable contributions were DAFs.3 In light of these facts, how should public policy treat DAFs? Second is the increasing number of especially wealthy philanthropists who are rejecting the standard philanthropic form—the private philanthropic foundation—and creating instead a for-profit entity, a limited liability company (LLC), as their preferred vehicle for social change. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced in 2015 that they would commit 99 percent of their wealth to advance human potential. Their announcement came not with the establishment of a tax-advantaged private foundation but with a for-profit LLC. In adopting the LLC form, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative avoids the already modest regulatory requirements concerning annual reporting of grant making and prohibitions on political giving that attach to private foundations.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Instead of blanketing airwaves with a single political ad, they could use detailed behavioral profiles to micro-target their messaging, showing ads that appealed specifically to individuals and the issues they held dear. Facebook even allowed campaigns to upload lists of potential voters and supporters directly into the company’s data system, and then use those people’s social networks to extrapolate other people who might be supportive of a candidate.85 It was a powerful and profitable tool. A decade after Mark Zuckerberg transfigured the company from a Harvard project, 1.28 billion people worldwide used the platform daily, and Facebook minted $62 in revenue for every one of its users in America.86 Uber, the Internet taxi company, deployed data to evade government regulation and oversight in support of its aggressive expansion into cities where it operated illegally.

“Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn’t even heard of PRISM before yesterday,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. He blamed the government and positioned Facebook as a victim. “I’ve called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.” Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!

So instead of pushing for political and democratic solutions to surveillance, we outsource our privacy politics to crypto apps—software made by the very same powerful entities that these apps are supposed to protect us from. In that sense, Edward Snowden is like the branded face of an Internet consumerism-as-rebellion lifestyle campaign, like the old Apple ad about shattering Big Brother or the Nike spot set to the Beatles’ “Revolution.” While Internet billionaires like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg slam government surveillance, talk up freedom, and embrace Snowden and crypto privacy culture, their companies still cut deals with the Pentagon, work with the NSA and CIA, and continue to track and profile people for profit. It is the same old split-screen marketing trick: the public branding and the behind-the-scenes reality.


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Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

CONCLUSION We’ve been deservedly hard on Facebook, in this book and in much of our work, but that company’s famed CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote something that speaks to the spirit of the SOPA/PIPA fight, which we’ve in turn tried to capture in this book. Just as the world was abuzz with news that he was launching an initial public offering of stock in the company Zuckerberg drafted an explanation of the values that supposedly undergird Facebook’s management culture. His statement included a description of something he calls “The Hacker Way.” A few highlighted sentences: MARK ZUCKERBERG: The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers.

Those seeking to understand what kind of governance Internet users are willing to accept would do well to start by studying the engineering that establishes the network and how it is governed. The key protocols and standards that make the Internet work—that make the Internet the Internet—are developed and modified by voluntary committees of engineers, who meet virtually to debate the merits of new features, design changes, and other basic enhancements. Mark Zuckerberg (cofounder of Facebook) The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

IBM, Mobile App from Octo Telematics Uses IBM and the Weather Company Data to Help Drivers Score Savings with Pay-As-You-Drive Insurance (October 26, 2015), http://www- 03.ibm.com /press/us/en /pressrelease /47949.wss. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Josh Constine, “Facebook launches Messenger platform with chatbots,” April 12, 2016, http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/12/agents-on-messenger/; Ben Popper, “Mark Zuckerberg Thinks AI Will Start Outperforming Humans in the Next Decade,” April 28, 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/28 /11526436/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-earnings-artificial-intelligence -future. Madhumita Murgia, “Facebook Messenger’s New Bots Are a Powerful Way to Target Adverts,” The Telegraph, April 13, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk /technology/2016/04/12/facebook-messenger-launches-chat-bot-economy-to -take-on-apps/.

Another example concerns the combination of smart algorithms with Facebook’s vast user base, to improve targeting of ads and promotions. In its annual developer conference in 2016, the company discussed the way artificial intelligence (AI) could interact with the rich flow of data from its users. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, noted how “with AI and natural language processing combined with human help, people will be able to talk to Messenger bots just like they talk to friends.”55 David Marcus, VP messaging products, reported how the company is “testing if business bots can re-engage people on threads with sponsored messages.”56 Not surprisingly, Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are also investing in voice-activated digital assistants that “learn” to make decisions rather than simply follow instructions.57 The future of instant and online communications will heavily rely on the mutually reinforcing relationship between Big Data and Big Analytics.


pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Liberal worries over mail-in ballots: “Signature Verification and Mail Ballots: Guaranteeing Access While Preserving Integrity: A Case Study of California’s Every Vote Counts Act,” Policy Practicum: Every Vote Counts (Law 806Z), Stanford Law School Law and Policy Lab, May 15, 2020, www-cdn.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/SLS_Signature_Verification_Report-5-15-20-FINAL.pdf. Silicon Valley money and voting: C. Aguayo, “AMISTAT PROJECT Details FB CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s $500 Million Influence on Election, in Recent Report,” NewsNet, December 17, 2020, https://yournewsnet.com/amistat-project-details-fb-ceo-mark-zuckerbergs-500-million-influence-on-election-in-recent-report. 14. A. Viswanatha and S. Gurman, “Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick Died of Stroke, D.C. Medical Examiner Says,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2021, www.wsj.com/articles/capitol-police-officer-brian-sicknick-died-of-stroke-d-c-medical-examiner-says-11618864840.

They too instead had a claim on oppression, by their very unalterable identity, and thus could put their formerly caricatured ill-gotten gains to work for the new woke cause—while squaring the circle of their very real economic and social privilege. Few have noted the deleterious new role of identity politics, wealth, and the eclipse of class in the fragmentation of citizenship into tribes. White male billionaires like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and the heads of Goldman Sachs need only concede the unfairness of the system they had mastered for their own benefit—and then put a percentage of their billions in the service of race and sex equality—to be part of the revolution, while being granted easy exemptions for the continuance of their own fortunes, influence, privilege, and power.14 If old Marxism had once sought to transcend race and unite the global oppressed, in a much wealthier twenty-first-century world, new cultural and racial Marxism sought to return to ancient tribal criteria of oppression.


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

In an interview back in 2002 he explained that effective web search, really giving people what they want, required understanding “everything in the world” and that this required an AI. A decade later he rightly predicted that machine learning would become all the rage. Amazon would release a speech-recognition gizmo called Echo. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who publicized his annual life-betterment goals, would spend one year inventing an AI butler. Tech companies threw around the slogan “mobile-first,” signposting their fitness for the smartphone world; Google would declare itself “AI-first.” Once the arcade boxing clip concluded on the TED stage, Page caught his breath.

“They better be careful,” the president huffed in August, “because they can’t do that to people.” Trump allies attacked Silicon Valley platforms for abusing their protected status under Section 230, the law that shielded user-generated websites from liability. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, berated Mark Zuckerberg in a hearing for failing to operate Facebook as a “neutral public forum,” as Section 230 dictated. In fact, the law did not dictate this, but this blustering threat still worked. Within Google, members of its policy team were instructed to be extra cautious about anything Section 230 related and anything that might make Google appear as if it were taking on the role of a publisher.

Outrage in the press and halls of power usually focused on the social networks, not the video site. In 2021 President Joe Biden chastised tech platforms for promoting vaccine hesitancy, specifically accusing Facebook of “killing” people with lies. Ire on the right was largely aimed at Twitter, which had booted Trump off the service after the January 6 insurrection. Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, the chiefs of Facebook and Twitter, testified multiple times before Congress; Susan Wojcicki never did. YouTube was the sleeping giant of social media. There were many reasons for this. YouTube was better situated to avoid information warfare. You might see your cranky uncle rant about vaccines on Facebook or Twitter, but probably not YouTube.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

The first regional regulatory regime for data privacy, the GDPR has become the de facto global standard that companies must comply with and other nations must at least consider when crafting their own standards. While the U.S. government has taken a much more laissez-faire attitude to tech regulation, with members of Congress dragging tech leaders like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg before Congress for a public browbeating but passing little in the way of substantive regulation, Europe has leaned into regulating technology. American business executives have decried Europe’s model, arguing too much regulation could “strangle business,” and it is certainly true that overly burdensome regulations could harm innovation.

Camargo, “We Don’t Understand How YouTube’s Algorithm Works—and That’s a Problem,” Fast Company, January 24, 2020, https://www.fastcompany.com/90454610/we-dont-understand-how-youtubes-algorithm-works-and-thats-a-problem. 145reduce recommendations of “borderline” content: “Continuing Our Work to Improve Recommendations on YouTube,” YouTube Official Blog, January 25, 2019, https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/continuing-our-work-to-improve; “The Four Rs of Responsibility, Part 2: Raising Authoritative Content and Reducing Borderline Content and Harmful Misinformation,” YouTube Official Blog, December 3, 2019, https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/12/the-four-rs-of-responsibility-raise-and-reduce.html. 14570 percent drop in watch time for borderline content: “The Four Rs of Responsibility, Part 2.” 145flat earth videos: Thompson, “YouTube’s Plot to Silence Conspiracy Theories.” 145promoting “meaningful interactions”: Mark Zuckerberg, “One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent . . .” Facebook, January 11, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104413015393571?pnref=story. 145posts that “spark conversations”: Adam Mosseri, “Bringing People Closer Together,” about.fb.com, January 11, 2018, https://about.fb.com/news/2018/01/news-feed-fyi-bringing-people-closer-together/. 145new algorithm “pushed up articles on divisive topics”: Laura Hazard Owen, “One Year In, Facebook’s Big Algorithm Change Has Spurred an Angry, Fox News-Dominated—and Very Engaged!

McKinnon and Alex Leary, “Trump Considers Forming Panel to Review Complaints of Online Bias,” Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-considers-forming-panel-to-review-complaints-of-online-bias-11590238800. 150soft-pedal right-wing disinformation: Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive,” Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499. 150Facebook altered its algorithm to boost the rankings: Kevin Roose, “Facebook Reverses Postelection Algorithm Changes That Boosted News from Authoritative Sources,” New York Times, December 16, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/technology/facebook-reverses-postelection-algorithm-changes-that-boosted-news-from-authoritative-sources.html. 150incited a riot to storm the Capitol: Twitter Inc., “Permanent Suspension of @realDonaldTrump,” Twitter Blog, January 8, 2021, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html; Mark Zuckerberg, “The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate . . .” Facebook, January 7, 2021, https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10112681480907401. 150account suspensions were clearly necessary: Sheera Frenkel, “The Storming of Capitol Hill Was Organized on Social Media,” New York Times, January 6, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/protesters-storm-capitol-hill-building.html. 150Republican members of Congress objected to certifying: Karen Yourish, Larry Buchanan, and Denise Lu, “The 147 Republicans Who Voted to Overturn Election Results,” New York Times, January 7, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/07/us/elections/electoral-college-biden-objectors.html. 150debunked allegations of fraud: Ann Gerhart, “Election Results Under Attack: Here Are the Facts,” Washington Post, updated March 11, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2020/election-integrity/. 19.


pages: 76 words: 20,238

The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Asian financial crisis, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, confounding variable, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, income inequality, indoor plumbing, life extension, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, scientific management, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban renewal

It’s hard to measure the productivity of the internet, but twenty years ago—or less—we did not have Google, browsers, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, or Craigslist, among other major innovations, all now used by many millions. It is no accident that our most revolutionary sector is still one where “amateurs”—that’s what Mark Zuckerberg was—can make a major impact. In this regard, the internet is very much like the early years of the British industrial revolution. Unlike electricity, the internet hasn’t changed everyone’s life, but it has changed a lot of lives, and its influence will be even stronger for the next generation.


pages: 270 words: 79,180

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

To see what I mean, think of people as points on a piece of paper and think of the relationships between them as lines that connect those dots. Nozad might balk at this abstract, overly mathematical depiction of the ties between people, but it’s a common way to look at human connections, especially in our Web 2.0 era. When Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Weiner talk about the “social graph,” this is what they mean, except they’re referring to users of Facebook or LinkedIn. The points, or nodes, represent individual people, while the lines or links represent the social ties between the individuals.12 Our social graphs from the online world are often a crude replica of our actual social networks.

But judging by how ordinary people evaluate the decisions middlemen make, it seems that many of us don’t quite get it. Consider the following cases: •A single mother struggling to keep up with mortgage payments on her condo tries to refinance, but the lender rejects her application because she had recently lost her job, which is the very reason she is struggling.20 On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg refinances the loan on his $5.95 million mansion and gets an interest rate of 1.05 percent, less than half the national average.21 •A 50-year-old man gets advanced-stage prostate cancer, begins aggressive treatment, and applies for life insurance to protect his family if the worst case should happen.


pages: 261 words: 81,802

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

In taking this position, we are not denying the enormous contribution made by some of the mega-rich, including innovators such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. These men have truly changed the way people live today – a fact that perhaps puts them in a category quite different to, say, the stars of the handbag industry or the world of cable TV sports. Bill Gates may be the hardest case to contest, given that he is credited with nothing less than making the computer revolution accessible to hundreds of millions of people and donating billions of dollars to worthwhile causes. We will look at his case in more detail later. For now, though, let’s take a quick look at Mark Zuckerberg, who became a multi-billionaire in his twenties by inventing the social media network Facebook, which has an estimated five hundred million users worldwide.


pages: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Our immersion in innovative information, communication, and technology (ICT) platforms, specifically online social networks and handheld mobile devices, is the second phenomenon driving us toward a “we” mind-set. The “We” Generation Chris Hughes cocreated one of the defining businesses of the past decade, Facebook. Unlike his partners and Harvard roommates, Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, Hughes was not interested in the software itself. Instead, he wanted to figure out the ways that people would want to connect and share stuff with one another and how an online community could enrich the lives of its users—a passion that led to his nickname “the Empath” among Facebook insiders.

A commune with a focus, such as improving food quality, may get an e-mail from Whole Foods offering special discounts.26 Some skeptics have derided the idea as nice but “too Californian” to take hold in other parts of the United States. Yet within just eight weeks of the launch, Smith estimates that more than three hundred communes have been created, from Toronto to Texas. When we asked Smith what her ambition was within the next two to three years, she answered, “I want to be on Oprah sitting on the sofa with Mark Zuckerberg (one of the founders of Facebook) talking about the sharing revolution.” Her goal is driven not by arrogance but by a down-to-earth vision of wanting people to embrace communal behaviors to become resource efficient and connected. In a recent article in the New York Times, “Saving the Suburbs,” Allison Arieff commented about the growth of Smith’s cul-de-sac projects.


pages: 244 words: 81,334

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

Speculative fictions of the near-future envision the eerie signs of an artificial life form’s emerging sentience: a lingering, knowing stare from their synthetic eyes, the merest smirk at the outer edge of their polymer lips. Programmes such as Humans, Black Mirror and Westworld, as well as the films Her and Ex Machina, explore artificial life grappling with the subtlest shades of feeling, broadcast in an era in which Mark Zuckerberg has yet to trust us with a ‘Dislike’ button. Hanson Robotics’s more recent invention is the robot Sophia, who in 2017 was awarded Saudi Arabian citizenship. In a scripted interview, Sophia announced in that stilted, metallic robot voice we’ve known for ever: ‘I want to14 live and work with humans.

., 1870); ‘all the things …’, Marcus Mustafa, quoted in Jamie Carter, ‘How mining human emotions could become the next big thing in tech’, www.techradar.com, 20th April 2015; ‘You can look …’, see Mitra Sorrells, ‘How Jaguar Is Using Technology to Visualise the Mood at Wimbledon’, www.bizbash.com, 7th July 2015. 12 ‘We are now …’, a version of these arguments first appeared in ‘A Sentimental Portrait’; ‘It’s a big …’, Rafael Nadal interview with TennisTV, August 2017. 13 ‘a comedy of …’, this section has been adapted from my ‘Openings’ column for the Financial Times, ‘As robots feel empathy, we get new emojis’, 23rd October 2015. Thanks to John Sunyer for commissioning and editing the piece. 14 ‘I want to …’, see ‘Interview with the Life-Like Hot Robot Named Sophia’, CNBC YouTube Channel, published 25th October 2017; ‘What they really …’, from Mark Zuckerberg’s live-streamed talk during a Facebook ‘Town Hall’ meeting, 15th September 2015. 15 ‘simple’, Pepper interview with Joanna Stern and Geoffrey A. Fowler, WSJDLive2015; ‘It was like …’, O. Henry, ‘The Gift of the Magi’ (1905), in 100 Selected Stories (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1995). 16 ‘scanned the headlines …’, Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square (Penguin Books: London, 2001 [1941]). 17 ‘It’s sometimes difficult ….’, Gérard Biard, quoted in Mukul Devichand, ‘How the world was changed by the slogan “Je Suis Charlie”’, www.bbc.co.uk, 3rd January 2016. 18 ‘“shattered” and “pierced”’, Andrew O’Hagan, ‘A City of Prose’, London Review of Books, 4th August 2005. 19 ‘a time which …’, Doris Lessing, A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews, ed.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

It is the reason Northeastern University has a “venture accelerator” it calls IDEA; that Harvard has the famous Innovation Center; that Boston University’s business school has a Department of Strategy and Innovation; that its College of Engineering has a Product Innovation Center; and that one of its colleges offers a certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. At Harvard, where I met innovation guru Clayton Christensen ambling across a parking lot, the dream of being the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates is almost palpable. As well as the usual incubators and accelerators, the school boasts a $100 million venture capital fund that is focused on commercializing the ideas of former students.19 One of this fund’s press releases quotes a Harvard professor on how this heap of money advances the school’s “mission,” which today (apparently) includes “marshaling significant resources to help create thrilling companies.”

An aura of youthful lightheartedness seems to envelop every interaction between the president and the techies. After all, one notable manifestation of Obama’s outreach to this powerful industry was his farcical 2015 interview with YouTube comedienne GloZell Green. Another was this famous exchange with Mark Zuckerberg, in the course of a “town hall” meeting at Facebook headquarters during which Obama proposed that the rich should pay higher taxes than they currently do: Zuckerberg: “I’m cool with that.” Obama: “I know you’re OK with that.”3 In the 1980s and ’90s, Silicon Valley was not a particularly Democratic industry.


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The pilot who goes through the OODA cycle in the shortest time prevails because his opponent is caught responding to situations that have already changed.” Back in the present, technological monopolies are putting this into practice, to lethal effect. Amazon now averages more than one software deployment every second. And on Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast, Mark Zuckerberg shared how Facebook gets smarter every day. “At any given point in time, there isn’t just one version of Facebook running, there are probably 10,000. Any engineer at the company can basically decide that they want to test something. There are some rules on sensitive things, but [. . .] they can launch a version of Facebook not to the whole community, but maybe to 10,000 people or 50,000 people—whatever is necessary to get a good test of an experience.”

“situations that have already changed”: Adrian Cho, The Jazz Process: Collaboration, Innovation, and Agility, Portable Documents (Boston: Pearson, 2010), 94. deployment every second: Wermer Vogels, “The Story of Apollo—Amazon’s Deployment Engine,” All Thing Distributed (blog), November 12, 2014, www.allthingsdistributed.com/2014/11/apollo-amazon-deployment-engine.html. “get a good test of an experience”: Andrea Huspeni, “Why Mark Zuckerberg Runs 10,000 Facebook Versions a Day,” Entrepreneur, accessed September 1, 2018, www.entrepreneur.com/article/294242. sure the trade-offs are real: Jordan Husney, “Strategic Prioritization Using ‘Even Over’ Statements,” Parabol (blog), Medium, October 22, 2017, https://focus.parabol.co/strategic-prioritization-using-even-over-statements-fb63e78e7b4d.


pages: 267 words: 82,580

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

‘The real genius of blockchain is that it is going to help us create a decentralised net that no one can censor. This is much bigger than just Bitcoin. We’re going to transform the entire internet.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I ask. ‘Well, at the moment your Facebook data isn’t really controlled by you: it’s hosted on Mark Zuckerberg’s servers. Facebook administrators can do anything they like with it, because they own the servers, and so they own your data. It’s not really free, because it’s centralised. A social media platform built using blockchain would be different. Your posts would become part of the public blockchain record, and every user of the platform would have their own copy.

p.170 ‘Sharing images of ourselves . . .’ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/opinion-naked-sexting/. p.170 ‘Viewers respond – sometimes positively . . .’ Like most online communities, there are rules: ‘no random porn dumps’, ‘post pictures of yourself!’ and of course, ‘be respectful to each other’. p.172 ‘In 2011, a Facebook group . . .’ Facebook was originally called Facemash. Mark Zuckerberg and his university friends wanted to rate the pictures of female students they’d managed to grab – without permission, of course – from the Harvard University files. Facemash placed a photo of female students next to each other and asked users to vote on who they thought was the best looking, with an algorithm slowly pushing certain girls up or down the list.


pages: 275 words: 84,418

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

Clients are now creating games, turning it into a book and then a movie. The agency now has a new media department. Apps are getting developed. It’s very dynamic.” Here’s an example. Lady Gaga’s next album, ArtPop, won’t be issued initially as a CD or digital download but as a mobile app. Her manager, Troy Carter, has a lot more in common with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg than with the traditional rock-star managers of old. He’s one of the first to use social media as the primary marketing vehicle for his client. In addition, he is fast becoming known as one of the savviest high-tech angel investors around, with early stakes in apps such as music service Spotify, taxi service Uber, and news service Summly (just bought by Yahoo!).

* * * In mid-May 2013, at the end of a marathon keynote presentation to open its conference for software developers, Google served up a surprise to its exhausted listeners. At the three-hour mark, Larry Page, the company’s publicity-shy CEO, came out to deliver remarks and take questions from the audience. Page isn’t a rock star CEO as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates once were, or as Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Larry Ellison at Oracle continue to be. In fact, Page’s appearance was notable for the exact opposite reason: few could remember the last time they had seen him center stage. He has been Google’s CEO for two years and is one of its cofounders. But during that entire fifteen-year period—Google was founded in 1998—he has taken pains to avoid the limelight.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

It allows a machine to discover new patterns without being exposed to any historical or training data. Leading startups in this space are DeepMind, bought by Google in early 2014 for $500 million, back when DeepMind had just thirteen employees, and Vicarious, funded with investment from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Twitter, Baidu, Microsoft and Facebook are also heavily invested in this area. Deep Learning algorithms rely on discovery and self-indexing, and operate in much the same way that a baby learns first sounds, then words, then sentences and even languages. As an example: In June 2012, a team at Google X built a neural network of 16,000 computer processors with one billion connections.

Furthermore, he said, all corporate planning efforts attempt to scale efficiency and predictability, meaning they work to create static—or at least controlled-growth—environments in the belief that they will reduce risk. But in today’s fast-changing world, Seely Brown continued, just the opposite is true. Mark Zuckerberg agrees, noting, “The biggest risk is not taking any risk.” Constant experimentation and process iteration are now the only ways to reduce risk. Large numbers of bottom-up ideas, properly filtered, always trump top-down thinking, no matter the industry or organization. Seely Brown and Hagel call this “scalable learning,” and given the growth rates of ExOs, it is their only possible strategy.


pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

FlyOnTime.us highlights how an entity that does not collect or control information flows, like a search engine or big retailer, can still obtain and use data to create value. Valuing the priceless Whether open to the public or locked away in corporate vaults, data’s value is hard to measure. Consider the events of Friday, May 18, 2012. On that day, Facebook’s 28-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg symbolically rang NASDAQ’s opening bell from the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The world’s biggest social network—which boasted around one out of every ten people on the planet as a member—began its new life as a public company. The stock immediately jumped 11 percent, as many new technology stocks do on their first day of trading.

Google’s obsession with such data for HR purposes is especially queer considering that the company’s founders are products of Montessori schools, which emphasize learning, not grades. And it repeats the mistakes of past technology powerhouses that vaunted people’s résumés above their actual abilities. Would Larry and Sergey, as PhD dropouts, have stood a chance of becoming managers at the legendary Bell Labs? By Google’s standards, not Bill Gates, nor Mark Zuckerberg, nor Steve Jobs would have been hired, since they lack college degrees. The firm’s reliance on data sometimes seems overblown. Marissa Mayer, when she was one of its top executives, once ordered staff to test 41 gradations of blue to see which ones people used more, to determine the color of a toolbar on the site.


pages: 314 words: 83,631

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

On the morning of Google’s public offering, in August 2004, the crowd at the café on our corner was electrified—not, presumably, because they themselves were getting richer by the moment (although maybe), but because it suddenly made everything seem possible again. Indeed, it was that same summer when Mark Zuckerberg moved his fledgling company, then known as The Facebook, from his dorm room at Harvard to a sublet house in Palo Alto. It wasn’t big news at the time—the only person I knew on Facebook then was my sister-in-law, still in college—but it was clear that it made perfect sense. As E. B. White said of New York, this was the place you came if you were willing to be lucky.

Or Eddie Diaz, who, after spending all night underneath the Manhattan streets, headed home for a quick shower before going back out again for his wife’s birthday. Or Ken Patchett setting down his giant mug of coffee to read the text message that arrived from his son—a sniper in the air force—who at that moment was sitting in a transport plane on the tarmac in Qatar. These guys aren’t Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. They didn’t invent anything, reshape any industries, or make a whole lot of money. They worked inside the global network and made it work. But they lived locally, as most of us do. What I understood when I arrived home was that the Internet wasn’t a physical world or a virtual world, but a human world.


pages: 309 words: 79,414

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

Their employees, executives, and their users are all afraid to express themselves for fear of being fired or shamed by a dishonest and disgusting establishment media oligarchy.7 They have picked a strong opponent. Facebook counts 2 billion monthly users, has purchased more than fifty companies and holds over 70 per cent of the market share. Sounds like a monopoly? ‘It certainly doesn’t feel like that,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Senator Lindsey Graham during his 2018 US Senate hearing.8 His response raised much laughter, although it wasn’t entirely wrong: there is indeed a growing niche audience that is exploring alternative solutions. As the big tech firms come increasingly under fire – whether in the US Senate, the EU, the British Home Office or the German Ministry for Justice – non-state actors ranging from radical libertarians to extremist users spot a unique chance to woo away unhappy clients.

Palo Alto, which hosts the prestigious Stanford University, is home to the founding fathers of today’s new media and modern communication technologies. The former house of Apple founder Steve Jobs is situated a few hundred metres from the homes of Google co-founder Larry Page and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Menlo Park, Facebook’s international headquarters, is just a five-minute drive away. I enter the closed-off campus, immediately paralysed by the sensory overload. Are you hungry? Choose between authentic Thai curries, American burgers and exotic ice creams. Bored? Drop by at the computer game arcade to play Crash Bandicoot.


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

This usually takes the form of wanting a robot butler to attend to your every need. (I will confess to having had many late-night undergraduate conversations about the practical and ethical considerations of having a robot butler.) A disproportionate number of the people who make tech fall into the camp of desperately wanting Hollywood robots to be real. When Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg built an AI-based home automation system, he named it Jarvis. One excellent illustration of the confusion between real and imaginary AI happened to me at the NYC Media Lab’s annual symposium, a kind of science fair for grownups. I was giving a demo of an AI system I built. I had a table with a monitor and a laptop hooked up to show my demo; three feet away was another table with another demo by an art school undergraduate who had created a data visualization.

If somebody appeared who had the talent, the magic touch, they would fit in.” The TMRC and Minsky’s lab were later immortalized in Stewart Brand’s The Media Lab and Steven Levy’s Hackers: The Heroes of the Computer Revolution, in addition to many other publications.6 The hacker ethic is also what inspired Mark Zuckerberg’s first Facebook motto: “Move fast and break things.” Minsky was part of Zuckerberg’s curriculum at Harvard. Minsky and a collaborator, John McCarthy, organized the very first conference on artificial intelligence, at the Dartmouth Math Department in 1956. The two went on to found the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, which evolved into the MIT Media Lab, which remains a global epicenter for creative uses of technology and has generated ideas for everyone from George Lucas to Steve Jobs to Alan Alda to Penn and Teller.


pages: 291 words: 90,771

Upscale: What It Takes to Scale a Startup. By the People Who've Done It. by James Silver

Airbnb, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, call centre, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, DevOps, family office, flag carrier, fulfillment center, future of work, Google Hangouts, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, pattern recognition, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

While he concedes that ‘it’s a worry some founders have, although not every founder’, Chandratillake says that it has driven some very high-profile founders to opt for ‘slightly paranoid share structures’, which are popular in the US and afford them some protection against being ousted. Since Mark Zuckerberg, among others, insulated himself as Facebook’s leader, the two founders of Snap - Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy - have done the same thing. ‘They have this special class of shares which means they are in control, and if either of them passes away or leaves, the other gets control so they keep it between them,’ he says.

And it should be the CEO or one of the founders who takes the lead. Lay out the facts. Be empathetic to those affected. And be very clear about what action you are urgently taking to fix things. Be visible and prepare for every negative question you might get asked. That’s the only way to regain the initiative - and your stakeholders’ trust. Mark Zuckerberg’s so-called apology tour, in the wake of Facebook’s 2018 data-harvesting scandal, followed this playbook to the letter. A whirlwind round of measured, mea culpa media interviews, combined with full-page newspaper advertisements apologising for a ‘breach of trust’, contained a storm, which had been fast-developing into a very serious threat.


pages: 283 words: 85,906

The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time by Joseph Mazur

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, computer age, Credit Default Swap, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Pepto Bismol, quantum entanglement, self-driving car, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, twin studies

“Every day, I put money—millions of dollars—on futures and credit-default swaps. It’s a legal crapshoot, but you gotta know what you’re doing. I can lose a bundle in one second, and make lots of money in the next.” I thought about what that trader meant by that last sentence, and then imagined the amounts Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Warren Buffett gained or lost in just fifteen seconds. The digital clock on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange is somewhat precise, yet not connected to the trading bell. The opening bell of the exchange is rung by a human at almost precisely 9:29:45 a.m.

Such high-frequency trades placed from locations all around the world account for almost 70 percent of the trade volume in the United States. According to Forbes, the net worth of Jeff Bezos and his family in 2019 was about $131 billion, of Bill Gates about $96.5 billion, Warren Buffett about $82.5 billion, Mark Zuckerberg about $62.3 billion, and Michael Bloomberg about $55.5 billion.1 These are staggering amounts of money. Just to give you an impression of how large these numbers are, consider how much money is gained or lost in just fifteen seconds of a normal day when the stock market is open. If we assume that as little as 30 percent of Bezos’s money is tied up in securities and exchange investments, Bezos could either gain or lose about $4.4 million every fifteen seconds, on average.


pages: 291 words: 80,068

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

We may believe the answer to our problems is to double down on human coordination in the future. All we need is to link together more and better. For the historian Yuval Noah Harari, human coordination marks not just the apex of our past but the elixir of our future. Speaking with Facebook’s boss Mark Zuckerberg in 2019, he argued, “We need global cooperation like never before because we are facing unprecedented global problems.” Yet this is only half the story. Inside every achievement is an idea; embedded in each monument is a mental model. Our economic, scientific, and social successes stem from our ability to comprehend and conceptualize, to see what is and what can be, and to connect our ideas with our actions.

On Easy Solar: Easy Solar, “Easy Solar Raises $5M in Series A Equity and Debt Funding to Scale Operations in West Africa,” press release, September 30, 2020, https://www.pv-magazine.com/press-releases/easy-solar-raises-5m-in-series-a-equity-and-debt-funding-to-scale-operations-in-west-africa. Yuval Noah Harari on human cooperation: “A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg and Yuval Noah Harari,” Facebook, April 26, 2019, transcript, https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/transcript_-marks-personal-challenge-yuval-noah-harari.pdf. Looking into the mind: It is only recently (i.e., the late nineteenth century) that scholars have looked deeper into decision-making abilities.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

and AOL were later bought by the telecom company Verizon, which, after large losses, recently sold them for $5 billion. Back then, Amazon was a loss-making new online bookstore. Just one year earlier, the venerable investment bank Lehman Brothers had warned that Amazon was incompetent, bleeding money and would probably go bankrupt within a year (eight years later, Lehman Brothers was bankrupt). In 2001, Mark Zuckerberg had not left Harvard to start Facebook – because he had not even started at Harvard. The social networks that ruled were Sixdegrees, AIM, Friendster and most importantly MySpace, which was so hot that Google saw it as a breakthrough to get a three-year advertising agreement with the network in 2006, which was signed at a glamorous party on Pebble Beach with such guests as Bono and Tony Blair.

Research on the US economy shows that market concentration grew the most in sectors where regulations increased the fastest.31 It is in this context that we should see Facebook’s new-found interest in abolishing section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency Act, which means that American platforms are allowed to moderate content without making themselves open to legal action for what others publish on their site. Without this, platforms would be stopped from taking any action against even hateful speech and harassment if they didn’t have the resources to engage in very strict moderation to make sure that nothing ever slips through. Mark Zuckerberg’s openness to abolishing it was greeted by some as a sign that he had become enlightened and realized that Facebook needs to be monitored more closely. In fact, it’s just the latest round in the old game of increasing your competitors’ costs. Reading, examining and moderating everything posted by the public almost in real time would be very expensive even for those who have Facebook’s entire infrastructure and 60,000 employees, but what is more important to Zuckerberg is that it would be completely impossible for smaller rivals.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Vicarious’s robots have a remarkable ability to improve at their assigned tasks—getting measurably better within hours of their initial operation.25 The objective is to create robots capable of not just picking items from inventory shelves or bins, but to go beyond that and design machines with genuinely versatile manipulative ability, including functions such as sorting and packing items, replacing the workers who tend factory machines by feeding parts in and out and performing detailed assembly work. Vicarious has raised at least $150 million in venture funding and is backed by some of most prominent names in Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and—as you might have expected—Jeff Bezos. In parallel with its progress in artificial intelligence, Vicarious is also pursuing an innovative “robots as a service” business model, which may eventually prove to be disruptive across a range of industries. Rather than building or selling its own robots, Vicarious instead acquires industrial robots from companies like ABB, integrates them with its proprietary artificial intelligence software and then rents the robots out to companies in a way that’s roughly comparable to the way a temporary employment agency might place human workers.

However, the potential for malicious use of the technology is inescapable and, evidence already suggests for many tech savvy individuals, irresistible. Widely available deepfake videos created with humorous or educational intent demonstrate what is possible. You can find numerous fake videos featuring high-profile individuals like Mark Zuckerberg saying things they would presumably never say—at least in public. One of the most famous examples was created by the actor and comedian Jordan Peele, who is known for his impersonation of Barak Obama’s voice, in collaboration with BuzzFeed. In Peele’s public service video intended to make the public aware of the looming threat from deepfakes, Obama says things like “President Trump is a total and complete dipshit.”3 In this instance, the voice is Peele’s imitation of Obama, and the technique used alters an existing video by manipulating President Obama’s lips so they synchronize with Peele’s speech.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

It proffered a horizontal rather than a vertical technology, connecting people directly with one another. It disintermediated authority and gave birth to a crowdsourcing wiki-logic in which knowledge would be subjected to democratic (critics would say anarchic) processes. Yet in application, the technological dreams were diminished. Social media as imagined by a college sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg (obsessed with rating girls and sharing gossip rather than generating a new mode of uplifting civic and social interaction of value to educators, deliberative democrats, or creative artists) instead produced the popular blockbuster Facebook—a product in which, though it defined social media, neither civic culture nor the culture of cities was visible.

These companies are abetted by the enormous publicity campaigns they run to market their brands, advertising the consumer virtues of pads, pods, and play-stations and boasting about the democratic architecture of their wizardry. Billionaires like Bill Gates (Microsoft), the late Steve Jobs (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) are pop celebrities and media heroes. As such, though they regularly swallow up their rivals (critics talk about “Facebookistan”), they are rarely subjected to the harsh spotlight once shone on earlier tycoons such as John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie.25 The term plutocrat is widely used today to disparage Wall Street and big finance, and is occasionally employed to batter traditional media bosses like Rupert Murdoch or Silvio Berlusconi.

But more pointedly, in the civic realm, the interactivity that could enable us to control new media and communicate with one another actually ends up (for the same reason) allowing the new media to watch and control us; allowing us to influence each other, sometimes in ways we don’t even notice. While the web hosts a plethora of independent sites and critical blogs of real value to public debate, they are often overshadowed or simply buried by a cacophony of digital noise and the din of big companies.30 Sharing is a great virtue of new media and has become Mark Zuckerberg’s defining ideal: he wishes to help us do together just about anything that can be done. Except, unfortunately, politics and civics, which are activities that must be done together. Yet in a world of polarized ideology and divisive rhetoric, they rarely are. Jeff Jarvis has celebrated at book length how the “publicness” of sharing compensates any loss of privacy.31 Lori Anderson writes about the flip side of Internet sharing, that it is not always voluntary.32 Collecting and sharing information on consumers and citizens alike is a multibillion-dollar business whose primary object is the commercial exploitation of consumers.


pages: 590 words: 152,595

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day

.’”: Ibid. 241 AI risk “doesn’t concern me”: Sharon Gaudin, “Ballmer Says Machine Learning Will Be the next Era of Computer Science,” Computerworld, November 13, 2014, http://www.computerworld.com/article/2847453/ballmer-says-machine-learning-will-be-the-next-era-of-computer-science.html. 241 “There won’t be an intelligence explosion”: Jeff Hawkins, “The Terminator Is Not Coming. The Future Will Thank Us,” Recode, March 2, 2015, https://www.recode.net/2015/3/2/11559576/the-terminator-is-not-coming-the-future-will-thank-us. 241 Mark Zuckerberg: Alanna Petroff, “Elon Musk Says Mark Zuckerberg’s Understanding of AI Is ‘Limited,’ “ CNN.com, July 25, 2017. 241 “not concerned about self-awareness”: David Brumley, interview, November 24, 2016. 242 “has been completely contradictory”: Stuart Armstrong, interview, November 18, 2016. 242 poker became the latest game to fall: Olivia Solon, “Oh the Humanity!

It’s hard to dismiss people like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk out of hand, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. Other tech moguls have pushed back against AI fears. Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, has said AI risk “doesn’t concern me.” Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot, has argued, “There won’t be an intelligence explosion. There is no existential threat.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that those who “drum up these doomsday scenarios” are being “irresponsible.” David Brumley of Carnegie Mellon, who is on the cutting edge of autonomy in cybersecurity, similarly told me he was “not concerned about self-awareness.” Brumley compared the idea to the fear that a car, if driven enough miles on highways, would spontaneously start driving itself.


We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Wong had become a power contributor on the Q&A site Quora, developing a reputation as a Silicon Valley insider who frequently and unceremoniously pulled back the curtain. In response to queries from strangers, he discussed Facebook and other tech companies with a remarkable earnestness. He was blunt, and that read as honest. For instance, when a Quora user asked who ran Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Facebook page, Wong, who’d been Facebook’s engineering director, wrote simply, “He does.” On the day of his AMA, Wong logged in as u/yishan and saw the questions rolling in. How would he fix Reddit’s remarkably slow and ineffective search function? (He wrote he’d work to make it faster and more accurate.)

Certain conservative subreddits (such as r/The_Donald and r/Conservative, the two major hubs, and r/HillaryForPrison, an extreme anti-Clinton forum) were home to 80 percent of all fake news on Reddit, during and after the 2016 election cycle, they determined. From the outset of Trump’s presidency, instances remained high. Reddit wouldn’t admit anything of this sort publicly until six months later. Huffman would post in April 2018, as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress, that Reddit had identified 944 accounts that linked to and disseminated Russian propaganda meant to sow discord among Americans. He wrote that the majority of the accounts had been banned in 2015 and 2016. Regardless, thousands of posts in the lead-up to the 2016 election had shared links to phony websites created by the notorious Russian troll hub the Internet Research Agency to spread divisive propaganda.

In other words, what the Russian trolls had set out to do had worked to trick Americans. Huffman wrote that “the biggest risk we face as Americans is our own ability to discern reality from nonsense, and this is a burden we all bear.” Banning propaganda would not be enough. Huffman admitted in a comment in an April post on Reddit that he was glad he wasn’t in Mark Zuckerberg’s shoes testifying before Congress. (Reddit said it had turned over its findings to congressional investigators.) Such issues as requests from federal investigators would not be easily solved for Reddit. Back in October 2017, Reddit had filed a federal disclosure that in July it had hired a lobbying firm called the Franklin Square Group, which works with Alphabet, Apple, Dropbox, and Uber, among many other public and private tech companies.


pages: 467 words: 149,632

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

By “human behavior,” they meant the behavior of men; by “artificial intelligence,” they meant their own intelligence—a fantasy of their own intelligence—which they intended to graft onto a machine. They did not consider the intelligence of women to be intelligence; they did not consider a female understanding of human behavior to be knowledge. They built a machine to control and predict what they could not. They are the long-dead, white-whiskered grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk. The Simulmatics Corporation is a missing link in the history of technology, a clasp that fastens the first half of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, a future in which humanity’s every move is predicted by algorithms that attempt to direct and influence our each and every decision through the simulation of our very selves, this particular hell.

University of Michigan law professor Arthur Miller sounded an alarm in the pages of the Atlantic, warning of a grave danger to privacy: “a central computer might become the heart of a government surveillance system that would lay bare our finances, our associations, or our mental and physical health to government inquisitors or even to casual observers.”16 In an essay in Playboy, another legal scholar warned of the rise of “data surveillance.”17 But it was an anonymous law review article that offered the most poignant and prescient warning: “The fabric of human social relationships, dependent upon each person’s having only limited knowledge about other people, could be rent by leaks from the data center.”18 Each of these commentators missed something important, something that had come up at the hearings before Cornelius Gallagher’s committee only to be dismissed, not least because members of Congress tended not to have the most sophisticated knowledge of the latest developments in computer technology, or even of the not-so-latest developments. This remained the case for decades. In 2018, at hearings about Facebook’s handling of users’ personal data, eighty-four-year-old Senator Orrin Hatch asked baby-faced, thirty-three-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” Zuckerberg blinked three times, apparently shocked that Hatch could know so little about so basic a matter. “Senator,” he said, “we run ads.”19 During the hearings Gallagher held in the summer of 1966, Paul Baran, a very sharp computer scientist from RAND, said that it didn’t matter what Congress decided about whether or not to build a National Data Center, because data would be aggregated, would become big data, with or without the federal government.

What obligation does the collector, or holder, or analyst of data hold over the subject of the data? Can data be shared? Can it be sold?20 Congress didn’t answer these questions, or even debate them. Gallagher’s committee doesn’t seem to have understood what Baran was saying about the coming network of networks, any more than Orrin Hatch in 2018 understood what Mark Zuckerberg said about how Facebook works. Instead of shifting the debate to the nature and ownership and privacy of data itself, Congress simply tabled the proposal for a National Data Center. By 1968, the idea had been shelved, another casualty of the disintegration of Johnson’s Great Society. No building was ever built, no agency ever established, no federal regulations on data devised.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

,” Wired, February 23, 2005, https://www.wired.com/2005/02/paris-hilton-hacked-or-not/. Barack Obama admitted: Nick Statt, “Obama, Serious about Cybersecurity, Also Delivers Laughs,” CNET.com, February 13, 2015, https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/obama-serious-about-cybersecurity-also-delivers-laughs. Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter: John Leyden, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest Password Was ‘dadada,’” The Register, June 6, 2016, https://www.theregister.com/2016/06/06/facebook_zuckerberg_social_media_accnt_pwnage. Kanye West’s pass code: Jason Parker, “Kanye West Meets with Trump, Reveals iPhone Passcode Is 000000,” CNET.com, October 11, 2018, https://www.cnet.com/culture/internet/kanye-west-meets-with-trump-reveals-iphone-passcode-is-000000.

Hackers could have infiltrated these servers through the very web that allowed legitimate users to access their data. The simplest way to infiltrate these web portals would be by guessing passwords. Famous people have been known to choose extremely weak passwords. Barack Obama admitted that his password used to be password; until he was hacked in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest password was dadada; Kanye West’s pass code for his iPhone was 000000, which cameras picked up when he opened his iPhone in the Oval Office chatting with Donald Trump. On his blog Good Morning Silicon Valley, the journalist John Paczkowski wrote, “$5 and a Swarovski-encrusted dunce cap says [Paris’s] password was Tinkerbell,” the name of her favorite pet Chihuahua, whom she constantly carried around with her.


pages: 371 words: 93,570

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

“were so polite and nice”: Rhine, interview with the author, February 8, 2017. “The original model had been”: Rhine, interview with the author, February 21, 2017. “Facebook is good because it creates community”: Max Read, “Does Even Mark Zuckerberg Know What Facebook Is?” New York, October 1, 2017, http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/10/does-even-mark-zuckerberg-know-what-facebook-is.html. the year the Web broke: Myra M. Hart and Sarah Thorp, “Women.com,” HBS 9-800-216 (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2000), 4. “I always wanted to make this”: Pack, interview with the author, March 3, 2017.


pages: 353 words: 91,520

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

She petitioned her university multiple times to be able to design her own major that focused on leadership and organizations. The university denied her requests. Rebecca felt frustrated by the lack of support and the pattern that she saw emerging. She thought, “You did this to Bill Gates, then you did this to Mark Zuckerberg. You have done this to every creative entrepreneur here. All we do is drop out with a bitter taste in our mouth. I am a better bet than my peer that’s going to go to Wall Street. There are more and more entrepreneurs, and yes they’re risky, but when they win big, they win bigger than everyone else.”

In the past couple of years, attendance rates have jumped dramatically. Kids now come to school on snow days. And during lunch, groups of kids take their lunch trays to sessions tutoring them on things like writing skills. The Newark school system has long been viewed as Ground Zero for education reformers. Several, including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, the Waltons, and Eli Broad, set out to transform Newark schools and make them a national model. Zuckerberg announced a $100 million gift to Newark education on the Oprah Winfrey show, timed to coincide with the documentary Waiting for Superman. But, as the New Yorker reported, this heavily funded reform initiative accomplished nothing other than lining the pockets of consultants.


pages: 302 words: 90,215

Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do by Jeremy Bailenson

Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, computer vision, deliberate practice, experimental subject, fake news, game design, Google Glasses, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, overview effect, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telepresence, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury

WALKING IN THE SHOES OF ANOTHER 4. WORLDVIEW 5. TIME MACHINES FOR TRAUMA 6. ABSENCE MAKES THE PAIN GROW FAINTER 7. BRINGING SOCIAL BACK TO THE NETWORK 8. STORIES IN THE ROUND 9. REVERSE FIELD TRIPS 10. HOW TO BUILD GOOD VR CONTENT Acknowledgments Notes Index EXPERIENCE ON DEMAND INTRODUCTION Mark Zuckerberg is about to walk the plank. It’s March 2014, and we’re standing in the multisensory room of the Virtual Human Interactive Lab (VHIL) at Stanford University. I’m making last-minute adjustments to his head mounted display (HMD), the bulky, expensive, helmet-like device that is about to take him into another world.

However, the anonymity that was supposed to protect people’s speech and identity has also made possible a powerful subculture of Internet trolls who take delight in making other people miserable—sometimes because they disagree with what a person is saying and sometimes for sport. If innovators like Mark Zuckerberg and Philip Rosedale are right, and public debate shifts to virtual spaces, we can only guess as to what these encounters will be like. Avatar bodies cannot hurt you, but their perceived physicality and voice-carrying capabilities do make a greater impact than a comment on an article or a Tweet, and indeed there have already been allegations of sexual harassment and avatar trolling in some early virtual environments.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Leena Rao, “Facebook Will Grow Headcount Quickly In 2013 To Develop Money-Making Products, Total Expenses Will Jump By 50 Percent,” TechCrunch, January 30, 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/30/zuck-facebook-will-grow-headcount-quickly-in-2013-to-develop-future-money-making-products/ (accessed August 10, 2013). 7. Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance, “Facebook’s ‘Next Billion’: A Q&A With Mark Zuckerberg,” Bloomberg Businessweek, October 4, 2012, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-04/facebooks-next-billion-a-q-and-a-with-mark-zuckerberg (accessed September 11, 2013). 8. “Kodak’s Growth and Decline: A Timeline,” Rochester Business Journal, January 19, 2012, http://www.rbj.net/print_article.asp?aID=190078. 9. According to an analysis of 2006 tax returns in the United States by Emmanuel Saez of University of California, Berkeley. 10.


pages: 374 words: 89,725

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

As Ito puts it, “These days it’s easier and less expensive to just try out your ideas than to figure out if you should try them out.” What Ito is doing in his lab is also happening at companies such as Google and Facebook, and throughout much of the tech industry worldwide. At Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg has64 elevated the idea of quickly building and testing ideas to a sacred principle that Zuckerberg has described as the Hacker Way. In a letter to potential Facebook investors at the time of the company’s 2012 IPO, Zuckerberg explained that while the word hacking has some negative connotations, at Facebook it means “building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.”

Joe Sharkey, “Reinventing the Suitcase by Adding the Wheel,” New York Times, October 4, 2010. 63 As the writer Peter Sims noted in . . . Peter Sims, “The Number One Enemy of Creativity: Fear of Failure,” Harvard Business Review, October 5, 2012; see also, Peter Sims, “Daring to Stumble on the Road to Discovery,” New York Times, August 7, 2011. 64 At Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg has . . . Zuckerberg published his manifesto “The Hacker Way” as part of his letter to investors during Facebook’s IPO in early 2012. Wired reprinted the complete letter, http://www.wired.com/business/2012/02/zuck-letter/. 65 “the trick is to go from one failure . . .” This quote is worded differently depending on where you find it.


The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, bounce rate, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the telescope, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, lake wobegon effect, large denomination, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, New Economic Geography, New Journalism, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pepsi Challenge, performance metric, power law, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Robert Metcalfe, search costs, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, sparse data, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, Thomas Malthus, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Started by Adam Goldberg, an engineering and computer science student, Campus Network (initially called CU Community) launched before Facebook. It began with a head start in features and functionality. Blogging and cross-profile discussion were built into Campus Network from the start, while these features came later to Facebook. In Goldberg’s telling, Sean Parker urged Mark Zuckerberg to purchase Campus Network and to hire Goldberg. So why was Facebook ultimately successful, while Campus Network ended up shutting down in 2006? Journalist Christopher Beam suggests several possible factors that may have outweighed Campus Network’s early lead.82 One is money. Facebook quickly pursued financial backing, while Campus Network turned down advertisers and declined to seek venture capital funding.

Online sellers such as Amazon.com and eBay pioneered this technology,4 with other digital giants close behind. News sites such as Google News, cnn, and Yahoo! News now also rely heavily on learning algorithms. Facebook in particular has emphasized hyperpersonalization, with Facebook founder and ceo Mark Zuckerberg stating that “a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”5 With the rise of the iPad and its imitators, Negroponte’s idea that all of this personalized content would be sent to a thin, lightweight, “magical” tablet device has been partially realized, too.


pages: 318 words: 91,957

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, flush with a $50 billion endowment made possible by Microsoft’s early monopolizing, tried to use technology to overhaul curriculums in Washington State. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has launched the Bezos Academy, a preschool designed to cultivate entrepreneurial thinking. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to revamp the Newark public school system, an effort later deemed unsuccessful. And Adam Neumann, the WeWork cofounder, started a high-priced school for his children and their friends and let his wife design the curriculum. These expensive efforts were largely unsuccessful, making clear that improving how children learn and teachers teach takes more than money.

In 1913, the top 0.00001 percent was represented by four of the wealthiest men ever to walk the planet; John D. Rockefeller, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, and George Fisher Baker accounted for some 0.85 percent of the total wealth in the United States. In 2020, the 0.00001 percent was represented by just three men: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, who together accounted for some 1.35 percent of total U.S. wealth. Three men who founded technology companies possessed as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the United States combined. The wealthiest 0.01 percent of American households, around 18,000 families, also possess proportionally more capital than they did in the Gilded Age, today owning about 10 percent of the country’s wealth, compared to 2 percent in 1913.


pages: 98 words: 25,753

Ethics of Big Data: Balancing Risk and Innovation by Kord Davis, Doug Patterson

4chan, business process, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, en.wikipedia.org, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, performance metric, Robert Bork, side project, smart grid, urban planning

He emphasized that who we are—our identity—is multifaceted and is hardly ever summarized or aggregated in whole for consumption by a single person or organization. The implication is that if our identity is multifaceted, then it’s likely that our values and ethical relationship to identity are also multifaceted. Expressing a seemingly opposing view, Mark Zuckerberg recently made the assertion that having more than one identity demonstrates a “lack of integrity” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/technology/14facebook.html). If our historical understanding of what identity means is being transformed by big-data technologies (by providing others an ability to summarize or aggregate various facets of our identity), then understanding our values around the concept itself enhances and expands our ability to determine appropriate and inappropriate action.


pages: 94 words: 26,453

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

To paraphrase John Wayne’s advice to an inferior gunslinger: “Mister, you’d better find another line of work, this one sure don’t fit your pistol.” Becoming occult “Hobbyists”. This was the dismissive name given to those who pursue their passion for piffling self-indulgences like personal computing. Bill Gates was a “hobbyist”. The hours that Gates and Mark Zuckerberg put into their passions while others were partying earned them the scornful epithet “geek”. Nowadays the chorus no longer laughs in unison at geeks; geeks and nerds are the new rock ’n’ roll stars after all. And it was that investment of time and passion which formed the foundation for their business.


pages: 615 words: 168,775

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

He added, “You can’t really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before.”2 Jobs did not mention it in his Stanford speech, but after he returned to Apple, he passed the baton forward to a new generation of entrepreneurs. Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page went to Jobs for advice when they were starting their company. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg considered Jobs a mentor.3 I once saw Zuckerberg eating dinner in the same hidden corner of a low-key Palo Alto Mexican restaurant where, years before, I had seen Jobs. Zuckerberg was in the same seat, at the same table, sitting, as Jobs had, alone, his back to the window. The period covered in this book marks the first time that the generational handoff happened on a grand scale, as pioneers of the semiconductor industry passed the baton to younger up-and-comers developing innovations that would one day occupy the center of our lives.II The result was staggering.

Sun, also facing competition from less expensive servers running Linux and Berkeley Unix operating systems, never recovered. In 2010, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun for $7.4 billion. Oracle’s cofounder and CEO was Larry Ellison, a former Ampex employee who had worked on the same Videofile system as Atari’s Al Alcorn, Nolan Bushnell, and Ted Dabney. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg left the Sun sign angled so that employees pulling out of the main campus parking lot could see it, he was sending them a message: take none of Facebook’s success—the wealth, the accolades, the free lunches, the pride you feel in your company’s name—for granted. Even a once iconic company can disappear in the wake of relaxed vigilance, a few bad quarters, a series of poor decisions, or the rise of a new competitor.

Spielberg, quoted in Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (Simon & Schuster, 1998): 20. 2. Steve Jobs, interview by author, May 24, 2003. 3. See Zuckerberg’s comments on Jobs on Charlie Rose, Nov. 7, 2011. Zuckerberg has also said that he visited a temple in India on Jobs’s recommendation. See, e.g., http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-visited-india-thanks-to-steve-jobs-2015-9. 4. “OTL Financial Data, 1970–2016.” KK; Martin Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 115. 5. Gabriel Metcalf, “Beyond Boom and Bust: Where Is Silicon Valley Taking Us?


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Personal freedom allows us sufficient time to think. Making good decisions requires quiet time alone in our heads to think through a problem from multiple points of view. Uninterrupted personal time is life’s most valuable limited resource. Several notable creators, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, regularly take “think weeks” to invigorate their thinking and to allow their minds to wander. They often advocate the value of taking time off specifically to relax and clear one’s head. Taking a whole week off to focus on our thinking process may sound like a farfetched scenario, but this is possible once we achieve financial independence.

All of these businesses scaled up much more quickly than Carnegie’s steel plants or Rockefeller’s oil refineries. It took decades of toil and sweat, and significant sums of capital, to go around the country and cobble together a network of refineries in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It took Mark Zuckerberg just eight years to build Facebook from nothing to a business with $100 billion in valuation—and just four more years to reach $300 billion. The big picture is that software is eating the world—that is, many of the products and services developed over the past 150 years are transforming into, or being disrupted by software….

Luck’s role is hidden because outstanding success is spotlighted; failure is all around but unpublicized and unseen. Jennifer Aniston and Sandra Bullock worked as waitresses before they became movie stars. The remaining thousands of waiters and waitresses in Los Angeles probably never got a casting call. For every Mark Zuckerberg, thousands of tech entrepreneurs and employees have little to show for decades of effort. In his book How to Get Lucky, Max Gunther writes a tour de force on luck, chance, serendipity, and randomness: It isn’t enough just to be good. You’ve got to be lucky, too…. …Good luck is the essential basic component of success, no matter what your personal definition of “success” may be….


pages: 315 words: 99,065

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

The word innovation tends to set most people thinking about places like Silicon Valley – which has its own fair share of sharks – about huge technological advances and companies with even huger research and development budgets. But my favourite stories are always those about people who have come up with a simple idea and with little or no money made a big success of it. Obviously the likes of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and others qualify for inclusion in such a category but there are also a lot of lesser known but every bit as impressive stories out there – like Sara Blakely’s, for instance – a lady whose career track has an amazing number of parallels to mine. SPANX A MILLION I first met Sara when she became a contestant on my 2004–05 one-season wonder of a US TV show The Rebel Billionaire.

‘Technology should be about more than just newest, loudest, prettiest – it should make a real difference.’ Dave Morin who spent time at Facebook as well as Apple before creating the critically acclaimed social-networking app Path, commented that the impetus for great design has got to come from the top. And having worked with both Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, he should certainly know! Dave believes that everyone at a company should care about how a product looks, feels and works — not just the people with the word ‘design’ in their job titles. He added that modern companies need CEOs with a taste for good design every bit as much as they need accountants who are great with numbers.


pages: 572 words: 94,002

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

As the Dalai Lama has said: “Simplicity is extremely important for happiness.” Decluttering your house is a great practical introduction to the joys of simplicity and minimalism. It not only clears your mind but also reduces the choices you have to make on what to wear and where to store items. For instance, much like Mark Zuckerberg and his grey t-shirts[217], I have a small range of clothing. I don’t have to waste time choosing what to wear every day – because I don’t have much choice. Also, I have a versatile holdall[218] that can double as a suitcase, briefcase, rucksack, running emporium. I don’t need to spend time deciding which bag will meet my needs the next morning – because I have one I love that covers every eventuality.

[214] “without exception dramatically altered”: “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying: A simple, effective way to banish...” toreset.me/214, p. 206. [215] Minimalists: A Documentary About the Important Things: “Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things.” toreset.me/215. [216] “elements of a fulfilling existence”: “Your Money or Your Life – Amazon UK.” toreset.me/216, p. xxiii. [217] his grey t-shirts: “This photo of Mark Zuckerberg’s closet is literally the least surprising...” 26 Jan. 2016, toreset.me/217. [218] versatile holdall: “Osprey Porter 65 Travel Duffel – YouTube.” 23 Jul. 2015, toreset.me/218. [219] Tim Ferriss’s 5-Bullet Friday: “Welcome to 5-Bullet Friday | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.” toreset.me/219. [220] Pakt One venture: “Pakt.” toreset.me/220. 17.


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

By this measure, incomes in the U.S. economy today are almost as skewed as they were in the rock and roll industry when Bruce Springsteen cut “Born in the U.S.A.” One reason the entire economy has veered toward a superstar, winner-take-all affair is the rise of digital technology. Successful entrepreneurs can turn apps and digital technology into fortunes worth billions of dollars. Five of the six wealthiest Americans (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg, and Jeff Bezos)—whose combined wealth equals nearly that of half of the world’s population—made their fortunes because of digital technology.16 Digital technology is scalable. One day soon the top surgeons may be able to operate on a great many more patients due to improvements in digital technology.

Commenting on the 1870s, Marshall wrote, “A business man of average ability and average good fortune gets now a lower rate of profits…than at any previous time, while the operations, in which a man exceptionally favoured by genius and good luck can take part, are so extensive as to enable him to amass a large fortune with a rapidity hitherto unknown.”3 Sound familiar? The same might be said of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg today. Marshall’s explanation for the growing income gap between superstar businessmen and everyone else rested on new developments in communications technology—namely, the telegraph. The telegraph connected Great Britain with America, India, and even places as far away as Australia.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

The difference is that these particular companies are developing autonomous decision-making systems intended to represent all of our interests. Criticism is coming not just from women and people of color but from an unlikely group of people: conservatives and Republican Party stalwarts. In May 2018, the Republican National Committee sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg accusing Facebook of bias against conservative Americans, which read in part: “Concerns have been raised in recent years about suppression of conservative speech on Facebook… including censorship of conservative news stories.… We are alarmed by numerous allegations that Facebook has blocked content from conservative journalists and groups.”9 The letter, signed by Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the RNC, and Brad Parscale, campaign manager for President Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, went on to demand transparency in how Facebook’s algorithms determine which users see political ads in their feeds and a review into bias against conservative content and leaders.

Google captured images of our homes and neighborhoods and made them searchable in Google Maps without asking us first. (People are avoided when possible, and their faces are blurred out.) Apple slowed down its older iPhones as its new models hit the shelves and apologized. Post–Cambridge Analytica, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a general apology on his Facebook wall, writing, “For those I hurt this year, I ask for forgiveness and I will try to be better. For the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together, I ask forgiveness.” Therefore, the G-MAFIA tend to move swiftly in developmental spurts until something bad happens, and then the government gets involved.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

In 2010 Facebook surpassed Google as the United States’ most visited website, with 8.9 percent of all American website visits versus Google’s 7.2 percent. Facebook had reached more than 500 million users.13 Not surprisingly, perhaps, Time magazine’s 2010/2011 Person of the Year was Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Now, the new question was “What’s happening?” Despite their respective drawbacks, social media continue to promote utopian expectations of instant and ever growing communities, including Wikipedia’s volunteer communities. Not just consumers but corporate executives themselves seek vastly expanded social interactions for their devices and enterprises.

Kahn, “Facebook Film Not Making Friends with Some Harvard Grads,” Boston Globe, October 2, 2010, A1, A9; David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010); Miguel Helft, “Facebook Aims to Expand Its Reach,” Boston Globe, April 19, 2010, B8; Mark Zuckerberg and Donald E. Graham, “Answering Facebook Privacy Concerns,” Bangor Daily News, May 25, 2010, A7; Dan Fletcher, “Facebook: Friends Without Borders,” Time, 175 (May 31, 2010), 32–38; Alex Beam, “Everybody Hates Facebook: For Hundreds of Millions, You Can’t Live Without It or Without Complaining About It,” Boston Globe, August 27, 2010, G39; Kirkpatrick, “It’s Time to Clear Up Five Myths About Facebook,” Bangor Daily News, September 30, 2010, A7; Geller, Associated Press, “Facebook Founder’s Story Irretrievably Public,” Bangor Daily News, October 1, 2010, C9; Kahn, “What Does Friend Mean Now?”


pages: 420 words: 100,811

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

To elevate our specifics brings us to a key documentary condition of the Internet, something privacy theorist Daniel Solove details in his theorization of reputation in a dataveilled world: “In the past, people could even escape printed words because most publications would get buried away in the dusty corners of libraries. . . . The Internet, however, makes gossip a permanent reputational stain, one that never fades. It is available around the world, and with Google it can be readily found in less than a second.”40 A similar point is made in the 2010 film The Social Network, when Mark Zuckerberg’s ex-girlfriend berates him after a late-night round of boorish, sexist blogging: “The Internet’s not written in pencil, Mark; it’s written in ink.” While the practical permanency of the digital archive has long been called into question by digital scholars like Megan Sapnar Ankerson, this use of ink as metaphor bleeds beyond instances of mere blogging to also include the logging of our datafied associations into a database.41 Indeed, to return to gossip, people don’t just say they saw someone walking down the street.

By the same token, the Internet’s comprehensive capacity to surveil has led some tech leaders, especially those who stand to make money from cultivating our datafied lives, to join the media chorus and rhetorically toss the concept of privacy out the window. As Sun Microsystems’ CEO, Scott McNealy, quipped way back in 1999, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”14 Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, believes that privacy “is no longer a social norm.”15 And Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt described privacy as unnecessary and even dangerous, warning the surveilled masses that “if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”16 For these rich white men, privacy is dead because it impinges on their business models.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

In the last fifteen years, many of the most successful Silicon Valley firms have gone public with dual class stock that has left founders in sole control of their firms. Facebook, for example, issued two classes of shares when it went public. The Class A shares went to everyday investors and came with one vote per share. But the founders—mostly Mark Zuckerberg—got Class B shares. Every Class B share came with ten votes. This means that it is effectively impossible to force Zuckerberg to step down, no matter how badly Facebook performs.93 In general, the founders in question claim that this structure is necessary to protect them from shareholder pressure.

Ito Kunio, “Ito Review of Competitiveness and Incentives for Sustainable Growth: Building Favorable Relationships Between Companies and Investors,” Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), August 2014, accessed June 2018, www.meti.go.jp/english/press/2014/pdf/0806_04b.pdf, p. 52. 93. Jake Kanter, “Facebook Shareholder Revolt Gets Bloody: Powerless Investors Vote Overwhelmingly to Oust Zuckerberg as Chairman,” Business Insider, June 4, 2019, www.businessinsider.com/facebook-investors-vote-to-fire-mark-zuckerberg-as-chairman-2019-6. 94. Guest, CIO Central, “Sorry CalPERS, Dual Class Shares Are a Founder’s Best Friend,” Forbes, May 14, 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2013/05/14/sorry-calpers-dual-class-shares-are-a-founders-best-friend/#aa06d5012d9b. 95. “Supplier Inclusion,” https://corporate.walmart.com/suppliers/supplier-inclusion. 96.


pages: 349 words: 102,827

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum by Camila Russo

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, altcoin, always be closing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asian financial crisis, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Cody Wilson, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, East Village, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hacker house, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, mobile money, new economy, non-fungible token, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Turing complete, Two Sigma, Uber for X, Vitalik Buterin

“Is it going to be like Fight Club where the buildings come crashing down? No. Is there an opportunity to mitigate against systemic risk? Absolutely, and I think that is almost guaranteed over the long term. It’s just a better way of doing things.” He also raved about Vitalik, who had recently been awarded the prestigious 2014 World Technology Awards, beating out Mark Zuckerberg, who was also nominated. “He’s like, the next Alan Turing!” Joe didn’t say much during Jeff’s pitch/rant. He just stood there, cross armed, with a bemused look on his face. He offered Jeff the job while in transit to an Ethereum meetup later that day. Jeff held out initially because he wanted to see the terms of his contract before officially accepting the position.

Then in March Bitcoin reached above $1,200 and beat the price of an ounce of gold, prompting a new flurry of headlines saying things like “Bitcoin is more valuable than gold!” The rally was fueled in part on speculation that the long-awaited Bitcoin ETF would be approved. The Winklevoss twins, the same who were locked in a legal fight with Mark Zuckerberg over ownership of Facebook, were determined to become the first to launch a Bitcoin-backed exchange-traded fund. They were deep in the crypto game after backing Charlie Shrem’s BitInstant exchange and buying a big chunk of the bitcoins seized by the FBI when they shut down fraudulent Mt. Gox.


pages: 116 words: 31,356

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

Enclosure takes on an even stricter form with Facebook’s attempt to bring internet access to India and other countries through its Free Basics program. Facebook’s own services would be provided for free, but other services would have to partner with Facebook and go through its platform, effectively enclosing the entirety of the internet into Mark Zuckerberg’s silo.31 While rejected in India, the Free Basics service is now active in 37 countries and used by over 25 million people.32 Uber is also effectively building up a system that funnels passengers into its system. The decreased demand for non-Uber cabs means a decreased supply of non-Uber drivers, as more and more of the services move onto Uber.


pages: 139 words: 33,246

Money Moments: Simple Steps to Financial Well-Being by Jason Butler

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, behavioural economics, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversified portfolio, estate planning, financial independence, fixed income, happiness index / gross national happiness, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Steve Jobs, time value of money, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

Working with your hands (particularly connected with nature) and being self-employed, both which positively affect happiness, are optional extras! 22 THE STRAIGHTJACKET WHY BEING AN EMPLOYEE MIGHT NOT BE RIGHT FOR YOU ‘The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.’ Mark Zuckerberg, American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur My first full-time job, at seventeen, was working for a company in London which stored the master copies of geological survey maps for all the big oil companies. Most of the facility was in a basement and my job was to be locked in the windowless map vault and deal with the daily requests to retrieve and file the original maps.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

See Conor Dougherty “Google Loses to Linkedin in Silicon Valley Headquarters Pitch,” New York Times, May 6, 2015, http://nyti.ms/1F68CMI. 59.  Adam Greenfield compares “Zee Town” to company towns of years past in “Is Facebook's ‘Zee Town’ More Than Just a Mark Zuckerberg Vanity Project?” Guardian, March 10, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/mar/10/facebook-zee-town-mark-zuckerberg. 60.  See Kirk Johnson and Nick Wingfield, “As Amazon Stretches, Seattle's Downtown Is Reshaped,” New York Times, August 25, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/us/as-amazon-stretches-seattles-downtown-is-reshaped.html. 61.  See for example, Colin Marshall, “Amazon's New Downtown Seattle HQ: Victory for the City over Suburbia?”

Unsurprisingly then, Cloud network platforms have hired many of the best social network analysis away from academia. For example, during my time at Yahoo! I worked with small-worlds network pioneer Duncan Watts, formerly of Columbia's Department of Sociology and now at Microsoft Research. 51.  Company founder Mark Zuckerberg may have found a way around the problem of Facebook's closure from the open Internet, and that is to implement a proprietary aerial Facebook-centric version for the developing world. See Quentin Hardy and Vindu Goel, “Drones Beaming Web Access Art in the Stars for Facebook,” New York Times, March 26, 2015, http://nyti.ms/1GpPOXh. 52. 

The project is still to be approved, if at all, by Mountain View city council, and so we shall have to wait and see what is actually built to compare the real environmental platform to that proposed.58 By contrast, looking at Frank Gehry's early proposals for a new Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park (nicknamed “Zee Town” after company founder, Mark Zuckerberg) we see a plan for a more traditional corporate campus, designed, it appears, to ensure the managed serendipitous contact between employees in motion. In this encapsulated “company town” winding pathways and strategic lines of sight connecting interior and exterior views are embedded in a multilevel landscape where sub- and superterranean greenery twists and turns onto and under the collection of buildings.59 At their desks, the aggregate social graph of the on-site employee/resident population is framed and displayed to itself as it moves and involves itself within itself in airplane hangar–scale open-plan work space.


Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World by Bethany McLean

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, buy and hold, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, family office, geopolitical risk, hydraulic fracturing, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Upton Sinclair, Yom Kippur War

“We could change the entire manufacturing base in the U.S. if we just embrace what’s happening in natural gas,” Nucor’s then CEO, Dan DiMicco, told the Wall Street Journal. Fortunes were made. While the media focused its gaze on the high priests of technology like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, unknown tycoons quietly raked in billions. A man named Terrence Pegula, who was born into a coal mining family in Pennsylvania and who majored in petroleum engineering on a scholarship, ran a struggling small time drilling operation called East Resources, which he’d started by borrowing $7,500 from family and friends.


pages: 416 words: 106,532

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Little did Grayscale know it would have competition from former Olympic rowers and near-founders of Facebook. Perhaps best known for their involvement with the latter, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are two well-to-do investors. They claimed to be the originators of the idea for Facebook, which led to a $60-million settlement with Mark Zuckerberg. Since much of that settlement was in shares, its present-day equivalent is in the hundreds of millions. However, the twins were not about to disappear into oblivion with their millions; they had tasted greatness and were not the kind of figures who easily faded from the limelight. Eager for new ventures, Bitcoin provided just the opportunity.

In the past, this world was open only to the wealthy, but with new trends such as crowdfunding, token launches, and innovative regulation via the JOBS Act, opportunities exist for innovative investors of all shapes and sizes to get involved. Chapter 16 The Wild World of ICOs During the early tech days, innovators such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell became iconic figures who had turned ideas into multibillion-dollar businesses. Over the last decade, we’ve seen visionaries such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg do the same. These innovators changed the world because people believed in their visions, and these early believers invested money to turn their ideas into reality. While these investments brought great benefit, they were not based on altruism; initial investors were looking to get a sizable return on their risky investments.


pages: 407 words: 109,653

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, FedEx blackjack story, Ford Model T, game design, industrial cluster, Jean Tirole, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, school choice, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, work culture , zero-sum game

The most successful entrepreneurs had ring fingers 10% to 20% longer than their index fingers. As you hold up your hand to examine your own two fingers, this finding probably sounds downright absurd to you. For decades, people have speculated about what made Steve Jobs special, what set apart the Richard Bransons and Larry Ellisons and Mark Zuckerbergs from everybody else—what character traits facilitated their success, or what in their childhoods drove them to build their empires—and here comes two Italian economists to argue it’s all about the length of their fingers! Well, it’s not really about the length of their fingers. Finger length is actually just a marker, a sign of what was going on when these entrepreneurs were in their mothers’ wombs.

Tremblay, “Prevalence of Father-Child Rough-and-Tumble Play and Physical Aggression of Preschool Children,” European Journal of Psychology of Education, vol. 18(2), pp. 171–189 (2003) Schore, Allan, & Jennifer McIntosh, “Family Law and the Neuroscience of Attachment,” Family Court Review, vol. 49(3), pp. 501–512 (2011) 5. Sandra Lerner; Women in Silicon Valley: Boyd, E. B., “Where is the Female Mark Zuckerberg?,” San Francisco, pp. 82–93, 106–114 (Dec. 2011) Brush, Candida, Nancy Carter, Elizabeth Gatewood, Patricia Greene, & Myra Hart, “The Diana Project: Women Business Owners and Equity Capital, the Myths Dispelled,” Kansas City, MO: Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, (2001) Coleman, Susan, & Alicia Robb, “A Comparison of New Firm Financing by Gender: Evidence from the Kauffman Firm Survey Data,” Small Business Economics, vol. 33(4), pp. 397–411 (2009) Crets, Douglas, “Recruiting Women to the Burgeoning (But Mostly Male) Host of Angel Investors,” Fast Company, http://bit.ly/odqVEn (8/1/2011) Flynn, F.


pages: 349 words: 109,304

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton

bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, crack epidemic, Edward Snowden, fake news, gentrification, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, Ross Ulbricht, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the market place, trade route, Travis Kalanick, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

At its core, though, the relationship was personal. VJ’s greatest value was as an executive coach of sorts—someone who could mentor the young founder through problems germane to any start-up, like Bill Campbell, who had helped the creators of Twitter and Google, or Marc Andreessen, who offered advice to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. “What are my strengths?” Ross asked VJ one afternoon, hoping that his new confidant could hold up a mirror for Ross to see himself, a view that Ross, in his secret solitude, was incapable of discerning on his own. “You play your cards close,” VJ replied. “You really do get that it’s gone from fun and games to a very serious life or death lifestyle you’ve created.”

“But we’re pretty sure we’re going to have this site shut down in a couple of weeks.” Chapter 26 THE MUTINY Every founder goes through it. When Facebook introduced the “timeline,” its few-million-strong user base grew enraged at the privacy violations that came with involuntarily sharing everything you did with others. But Mark Zuckerberg had no choice; he needed to grow his revenue, and this was the path forward. Uber went through it when the company defiantly refused to eliminate its “surge pricing” model, which would make customers’ car rides double, triple, and in some instances even octuple without much warning. But Travis Kalanick had no choice; he needed to grow his revenue.


pages: 406 words: 109,794

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deliberate practice, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, functional fixedness, game design, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, knowledge economy, language acquisition, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, messenger bag, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, multi-armed bandit, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, precision agriculture, prediction markets, premature optimization, pre–internet, random walk, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, young professional

The push to focus early and narrowly extends well beyond sports. We are often taught that the more competitive and complicated the world gets, the more specialized we all must become (and the earlier we must start) to navigate it. Our best-known icons of success are elevated for their precocity and their head starts—Mozart at the keyboard, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the other kind of keyboard. The response, in every field, to a ballooning library of human knowledge and an interconnected world has been to exalt increasingly narrow focus. Oncologists no longer specialize in cancer, but rather in cancer related to a single organ, and the trend advances each year.

And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind. Starting something new in middle age might look that way too. Mark Zuckerberg famously noted that “young people are just smarter.” And yet a tech founder who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a twenty-year-old. Researchers at Northwestern, MIT, and the U.S. Census Bureau studied new tech companies and showed that among the fastest-growing start-ups, the average age of a founder was forty-five when the company was launched.


pages: 350 words: 109,379

How to Run a Government: So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy by Michael Barber

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Checklist Manifesto, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, deep learning, deliberate practice, facts on the ground, failed state, fear of failure, full employment, G4S, illegal immigration, invisible hand, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, North Sea oil, obamacare, performance metric, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, school choice, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

THE LAUNCH September 24 2010. Oprah Winfrey: ‘So, Mr Zuckerberg, what role are you playing in all of this?’ ‘I’ve committed to starting the Startup: Education Foundation, whose first project will be a one hundred million dollar challenge grant …’ Oprah again, interrupting, ‘One. Hundred. Million. Dollars.’2 Thus Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, announced his $100 million investment in Newark Public Schools. Why Newark, New Jersey? Because Zuckerberg ‘believed in’ the mayor of Newark, Cory Booker, and the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, who were there with him on Oprah’s show. Now that was a launch that had the ‘wow’ factor!

With a launch like that, expectations are raised sky high, but until someone starts work, the ground reality is unchanged. The gap between the two is vast. The result is a greatly increased risk. Rhetoric. Reality. Many a great idea has fallen through the gap between them. As Dale Russakoff put it in the New Yorker, Cory Booker, Chris Christie and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. In fact, ‘They got an education.’3 In this case, it would be wrong four years later to say there has been no progress – Cami Anderson, who runs the School District, points to increases in achievements, enrolment and physical infrastructure.4 However, even the celebrities involved would admit the outcomes are far short of the aspirations set out that day on Oprah.


pages: 353 words: 104,146

European Founders at Work by Pedro Gairifo Santos

business intelligence, clean tech, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, deal flow, do what you love, fail fast, fear of failure, full text search, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, information retrieval, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, natural language processing, pattern recognition, pre–internet, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, technology bubble, TED Talk, web application, Y Combinator

Did it have a huge impact on the company in terms of visibility, or was it just, you felt, a recognition of a job well done? Haas: Yeah, definitely. We had some really great moments in our journey, one being the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2010. I also once hosted Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook into the amiando office for a very nice evening in October 2008. So both things, of course, make the team incredibly proud and really help to form the unique culture of amiando, which is why we're really passionate about what we do. Of course, having Mark Zuckerberg in the office was fantastic also for the IT guys - they were motivated for months. Santos: Yeah, I can imagine. Haas: It's very interesting to see how Facebook is changing and growing.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

When you look at the rich lists, particularly in the USA, but also elsewhere, it is striking that so many of the superrich have acquired their wealth through work, leading to fantastic increases in the value of the companies that they founded and/or built up. This applies to Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and many more. And the key players are constantly changing. Consider the Forbes list. Of those listed as the wealthiest Americans in 1982, less than a tenth were still on the list in 2012. Moreover, the share of the Forbes 400 who came to their wealth through inheritance seems to be in sharp decline.

Accordingly, it makes sense for us now to leave it to one side and to concentrate on the more mainstream idea of a UBI. It seems much more likely to fly. Indeed, in some senses it has already taken off. Illustrious support The essential principle of a UBI has recently received widespread support, including from Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Tesla’s Elon Musk. At the World Government Summit in Dubai in 2017, referring to the coming transformation of transportation, the latter said: “Twenty years is a short period of time to have something like 12 [to] 15 percent of the workforce be unemployed.” And on UBI he said: “I don’t think we’re going to have a choice.


pages: 339 words: 103,546

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boston Dynamics, clean water, coronavirus, distributed generation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, Google Earth, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, young professional, zero day

And the lemons are packaged up and rebranded for what derisive bankers call the “dumb money” in the Middle East. “They don’t care about us,” he says. “They only want our money.” Days later Mohammed headed to Silicon Valley. Executives were eager to greet the prince. In pressed jeans and a blazer, Mohammed posed for photos with Mark Zuckerberg and visited Google’s founders. The reception was less effusive among the venture capitalists (VCs) whose ranks Mohammed wanted to join. While entrepreneurs were hungry for Saudi money, the VCs were a different breed. Often pompous, driving Teslas to their low-slung offices on Sand Hill Road in the hills above Palo Alto, they specialized in making small deals in early-stage start-ups that could pay giant returns in the unlikely event of success.

Pecker’s relationship to Trump, rather than the grand plans of the prince, became the focal point for many US pundits. Grine, who preferred to operate on the fringes, was now in the center of an embarrassing uproar that brought lots of publicity and no money. Mohammed continued his visit, meeting executives like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Apple’s Tim Cook. He ate dinner with Jeff Bezos and was photographed with Google founder Sergey Brin wearing his Silicon Valley best: a blazer, dress shoes, and a button-down shirt tucked into dark jeans belted across his broad belly. He sat with Oprah Winfrey, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and the CEOs of Disney, Uber, and Lockheed.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Just 16 percent of Americans think a four-year degree prepares students “very well” for a well-paying job.21 In part, this may have been prompted by the fact that many of today’s most successful entrepreneurs dropped out from these sorts of institutions. The list of nongraduates is striking: Sergey Brin and Larry Page left Stanford University; Elon Musk did likewise; Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard University; Steve Jobs left Reed College; Michael Dell left the University of Texas; Travis Kalanick left the University of California; Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey left the University of Nebraska and New York University, respectively; Larry Ellison left both the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago; Arash Ferdowsi (cofounder of DropBox) left MIT; and Daniel Ek (cofounder of Spotify) left the Royal Institute of Technology.22 This list could go on.

An early edition of the laws, from 1552, stated, rather dramatically, that “if any man or woman, able to work, should refuse to labor and live idly for three days, he or she should be branded with a red hot iron on the breast with the letter V and should be judged the slave for two years of any person who should inform against such idler.”13 The resentment runs both ways. While those in work rail against the unemployed, those without work also feel aggrieved toward those with it. This, in part, explains the curious reaction to Silicon Valley’s recent enthusiasm about the UBI. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have made supportive noises about the idea of a UBI; Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, and Sam Altman, founder of Y Combinator, have funded trials of it in Kenya and the United States.14 But their interest has been met with widespread hostility. If work were simply a means to an income, that response might seem odd: these entrepreneurs were essentially proposing that people like them should do all the hard work and give everyone else money for free.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Yarvin calls this system of government “neocameralist” and he certainly has one man in line for the job: “It’s easy to say ‘put Elon [Musk] in charge, he’ll figure it out,’ and he might well”.35 Some tech tycoons certainly appear to be eying the possibility of running for office. Before Facebook was riddled with public scandals over its role in the 2016 election, Mark Zuckerberg went on a country-wide road trip that led to suspicions that he may have been harboring presidential ambitions.36 The trip was immaculately staged and photographed, and the people he interviewed carefully chosen so as to not be too controversial nor disruptive, which goes to show how loosely he correlates transparency with democracy.

., “Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactonaries, TechCrunch, 11 Nov. 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/ 35 Matthews, D., “The Alt-Right is More than Warmed-Over White Supremacy. It’s That, but Way Way Weirder”, Vox, 18 Apr. 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained 36 Issac, M., “Mark Zuckerberg’s Great American Road Trip”, New York Times, 25 May 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/technology/zuckerberg-harvard-commencement-road-trip.html 37 “Steven Pinker on Genetically Re-engineering Human Nature”, The Nexus Institute, 2016, http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/steven-pinker-genetically-reengineering-human-nature/ 38 Norberg, J., Progress, pg. 124 39 Ridley, M., The Rational Optimist, pg. 346 40 Pinker, S., Enlightenment Now, Ch 22 41 Plous, S., “The Nuclear Arms Race: Prisoner’s Dilemma or Perceptual Dilemma?”


pages: 1,007 words: 181,911

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Blue Bottle Coffee, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital nomad, en.wikipedia.org, Golden Gate Park, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Loma Prieta earthquake, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, spaced repetition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the High Line, Y Combinator

—Tim 32 See the deer version. 33 This is another name for the loin of the deer, which runs over and along the spine, above the tenderloin. 34 If the crunch doesn’t cut through the ribs, drag back with a few hard slices afterward. ‡ David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” Gourmet, August 2004, http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster (accessed September 16, 2012). ‡ Patricia Sellers, “Mark Zuckerberg’s New Challenge: Eating Only What He Kills (and Yes, We Do Mean Literally...),” CNNMoney, May 26, 2011, http://postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/26/mark-zuckerbergs-new-challenge-eating-only-what-he-kills (accessed September 16, 2012). 35 One thigh, from an earlier butchered chicken, was twitching on a platter when we arrived, and was still twitching 10 minutes later. 36 You could also use a garden incinerator, which is like a metal garbage can with the holes already drilled in it. 37 This is a good time to toast marshmallows. 38 I don’t need to remind you about the dangers of consuming undercooked seafood, but I will.

Serve w lemon, tarragon, S+P. TOTAL TIME Depends on the size of your lobster (see chart in Pickup Step 02) GEAR 2 lobsters Stockpot Salt Tongs Aluminum foil Chef’s knife OPTIONAL MUSIC PAIRING “Eyes on Fire (Zed’s Dead Remix)” by Blue Foundation OPTION 1: BOILING Boiling lobsters is what Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, started with in 2011. He then worked his way up the food chain, all the way to shooting bison. Mark has a thing for what he calls “personal challenges.” In 2009, it was wearing a tie every day. In 2010, it was learning Chinese. He explained his 2011 challenge in an e-mail to Fortune magazine.


pages: 119 words: 36,128

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed by Laurie Kilmartin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, call centre, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, Uber for X

Now that your loved one is dead, honor their memory by not paying full price. “Mom died in her sleep” gets me nothing. But “Mom died in her sleep, and she slept on a Casper” gets me a promo code for 15 percent off a Casper mattress. STOP COMMENTING ON DEATH POSTS: The more you type, “I’m sorry for your loss,” the more Mark Zuckerberg is going to give you, “We lost Dad today.” Be cruel. Stop leaving comments. Ignore your friends and their grief. Or rejoice in it. “Good riddance to her! Your pain makes my heart sing!” Facebook will learn that you are a sociopath who can’t be trusted with other people’s despair. MAKE YOUNG FRIENDS: If most of your Facebook friends are middle age, then most of their parents are preparing to die.


Geek Wisdom by Stephen H. Segal

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, battle of ideas, biofilm, Charles Babbage, fear of failure, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, nuclear paranoia, Saturday Night Live, Snow Crash, Vernor Vinge, W. E. B. Du Bois

But that’s the inherent problem with anything that impacts society enough to bring about lasting change: Its success carries within it the seeds of its eventual dissolution. If history teaches us anything, it’s that the rebels of today are inevitably the establishmentarians of tomorrow—whether Fidel Castro, Kurt Cobain, or Mark Zuckerberg. And so, can you really blame Tyler Durden for wanting to keep a lid on his new favorite thing for just a little while longer? The novel Fight Club (1996) established Chuck Palahniuk as a major author of disturbing fiction. His short story “Guts,” about unfortunate masturbation accidents, established him as an author who could cause people to faint while listening to him read out loud.


pages: 151 words: 38,153

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

Equity leverage works by incorporating anticipated future earnings into present asset prices, thereby enabling stock sellers to get a lump sum now for a potential stream of future profits that may or may not materialize. If a company is expected to grow, this leverage can be huge—and it’s on top of the liquidity premium that accrues simply from enlarging the universe of potential stock buyers. It’s what enables people like Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, to become billionaires before they’re thirty. And that’s not all. Large chunks of many fortunes come from sources less visible than these. Consider the nest egg of another youthful billionaire, Bill Gates. According to Forbes magazine, Gates in 2013 was the richest man in America and second-richest man in the world, with a net worth of $72 billion.2 Virtually all of that comes from stock he received or bought cheaply as Microsoft’s cofounder.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

As he announced in 2006, Newark was to lead the way in urban transformation, and when President Obama requested that Booker join his own team in 2008, Booker refused, preferring to run for a second mayoral term. Newark is now the fastest-growing city in north-east US, and violent crime has been drastically reduced. In 2010 Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, donated $100 million to the city’s schools and many others have started to see Newark as a place worth investing in. This re-emerging Lockeville is on the way to recovery and while it might never achieve the economic might of Singapore, it is anything but a ‘machine without a soul’.

The day after the first protest, the authorities were so taken aback by the size of the march that the internet was switched off; on 27 February Ghonim was arrested and was not seen for the next twelve days until the Mubarak government was eventually closed down. In later interviews, Wael Ghonim personally thanked Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, for his role in bringing down the government. On the morning of Friday, 11 February, the atmosphere in Tahrir Square was tense; during the night the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces issued a second communiqué, but no one really understood what they had said. After morning prayers, the crowds began to swell.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

You’ve been to this city, you’ve been in that city, and you know in ten more minutes, you’re going to depart again.” Tufts proved to be a transformative experience. “We were very close to MIT and Harvard, which are exposed to many very innovative ideas and people. I probably spent half of my evenings at lectures at MIT or Harvard listening to people like Mark Zuckerberg—very enlightened people. By day, I did my homework, but at night, instead of staying in my dorm and partying with people, I went to these lectures. I probably learned more from these lectures than from my course work. “Peter Thiel visited MIT one month after I arrived for college to give a speech in which he talked about seasteading.

As of 2014, 75 percent of the world’s adult population owned a mobile phone. As we write, three global connectivity projects are in the works. The company where Patri works, Google, is testing Project Loon, a global network of stratospheric balloons it hopes will wirelessly connect a billion remote rural people to the Internet. Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook has partnered with Samsung, Nokia, and four other companies to launch a project called Internet.org, to provide World Wide Web access to the billions of people still not connected to the Internet. The Media Development Investment Fund has financed the Outernet, a plan to launch private satellites into space to provide free worldwide Wi-Fi access for billions of people locked in oppressive governments.


pages: 386 words: 116,233

The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by Mj Demarco

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, bounce rate, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, commoditize, dark matter, delayed gratification, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, drop ship, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, multilevel marketing, passive income, passive investing, payday loans, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Ronald Reagan, subscription business, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, white picket fence, World Values Survey, zero day

Interest works on your business an hour a day Monday through Friday; commitment works on your business seven days a week whenever time permits. Interest leases an expensive car; commitment rides a bike and puts the money into your system. Interest is looking rich; commitment is planning to be rich. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, didn't build the most-used social networking site by being interested. He was committed. Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb by interest; he was committed. Interest is quitting after the third failure; commitment is continuing after the hundredth. While I was building my company, my system, my surrogate, I was committed.

A blanket with arms? It's been around for years, but that didn't stop Snuggie from selling 40 million blankets via infomercial marketing. An old idea better marketed and better executed. It was an open road when the road seemed closed. MySpace was thriving well before Facebook, but that didn't stop Mark Zuckerberg. He saw a niche need and solved it. It was an open road when the road seemed closed. Poorly met needs are open roads when they often appear closed. Successful businesses take existing ideas, services, and products and simply make them better, or spin them in new directions. How to Spot Open Roads Not a day goes by when I don't spot a need that can be exploited for Fastlane opportunity.


pages: 425 words: 112,220

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

“They took pride in their employer as a really human place to work. And they were more committed as a result.” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO and whose personal experience of her husband Dave Goldberg dying suddenly was the inspiration for Option B, recalls, “I never would have gotten through this without Mark [Zuckerberg]. Mark was at my house the day I came home from Mexico and told my children. Mark literally planned Dave’s funeral. And Mark was with me every step of the way. When I came back to work and felt like I was a ghost and no one would talk to me, I took refuge in his conference room. . . . We think about providing that kind of emotional support to our friends. . . .

Perhaps your business model and all the assumptions leading up to it were fundamentally flawed. The truth will hurt, and it may set you back temporarily, but it will ultimately set you free. Entrepreneur and investor Paul Graham, founder of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, once remarked in an interview about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg: “It’s easier to tell Zuck that he’s wrong than to tell the average noob [new] founder. He’s not threatened by it. If he’s wrong, he wants to know.” Paul goes on to say, “What distinguishes great founders is not their adherence to some vision, but their humility in the face of the truth.” The greatest thinkers I admire anchor their ideas around a central truth—often one they believe is unique and unrealized by others.


pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

The potential of the Internet as a communications medium was hard to miss, but many people who wanted to exploit it commercially, especially people from outside the Valley, understood it as a version of broadcasting—a way for producers to make almost infinitely large quantities of information available to consumers anywhere in the world where there was an online connection, instantaneously and at no cost. People like Hoffman, Thiel, and Pincus—and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, whom all three met and invested in soon after his arrival in Silicon Valley as a teenage Harvard undergraduate—saw that the Internet would become a bidirectional medium that was more about creating connections among individual users than between a single purveyor and a mass of users.

* * * Things had been moving in this direction for some time, but LinkedIn’s initial public offering firmly established Hoffman as Silicon Valley’s unofficial mayor, or Godfather, or chief theoretician: “His Reidness,” as some of his old friends began calling him. He was below the very top level of wealth and public renown that such people as Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook occupied, but for the role he wanted to play, that was an advantage. Hoffman could still drive his own car and meet people in restaurants and coffee shops (though he’d begun making reservations under an assumed name), so he was able to circulate constantly in the community. He was not an engineer interested only in technical issues, and he was far more diplomatic than, say, Peter Thiel, and so was unusually likely to be sought out by people from the outside world who wanted entrée to Silicon Valley.


Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman by Ben Hubbard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, bitcoin, Citizen Lab, Donald Trump, fake news, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

MBS has never publicly discussed when he began plotting his political career, but he has talked about his desire to be a new kind of ruler, one who disrupted the old order like the giants of Silicon Valley, instead of one who followed the traditional ways. “There’s a big difference,” he said. “The first, he can create Apple. The second can become a successful employee. I had elements that were much more than what Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates had. If I work according to their methods, what will I create? All of this was in my head when I was young.” King Abdullah, however, saw MBS as an upstart whose experience fell far short of his ambitions. He named Salman minister of defense, but barred MBS from joining his father in the ministry.

Cisco Systems signed a preliminary agreement to upgrade the kingdom’s digital infrastructure. Microsoft signed on to a program to train young Saudis. Dow Chemical received a license, billed as the first ever, allowing it to operate in the kingdom without a Saudi partner. MBS got sit-downs with Tim Cook of Apple and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Photos of the young prince in jeans and a sport coat trying out a virtual reality headset at Facebook headquarters zinged around the kingdom, convincing many young Saudis that this prince was indeed different from the others. In his meetings, MBS pitched a bright future for Saudi Arabia and argued that authoritarianism would help bring it about.


pages: 179 words: 42,006

Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours by Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen, Franck Nouyrigat

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, business climate, fail fast, hockey-stick growth, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, transaction costs, web application, Y Combinator

While the average guy on the street may think that an entrepreneur without an idea is like a cyclist without a bike, we at Startup Weekend know the truth, which we&apos;ve repeated again and again: Ideas are important, but the team is essential. The news is full of stories of the lone entrepreneur who clings tightly to his dream and works tirelessly, for years and against all odds, to prove all the naysayers wrong. We hear the Mark Zuckerbergs praised as tenacious geniuses (and they are); but that&apos;s only half of the story. Even visionaries need a team of doers to bring their paradigm-shifting, brand-new idea to life. From mentors to investors to lawyers to employees to fellow cofounders, there&apos;s a whole stream of people involved in even the most humble startup.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

As Rebecca MacKinnon puts it, “Open-source software is not inherently anti-business,” and many of the giants like Google use it where it helps them.53 “Many businesses built on top of open source,” notes James Losey of the New America Foundation, “such as Apple building its OSX on top of Unix.”54 Google and Wikipedia, as Siva Vaidhyanathan writes, have such a strong synergy—Wikipedia ranks near the top of most Google searches—that “it’s unlikely any reference source would unseat Wikipedia.”55 This cooperative sector is important for the corporate players too, because it brings legitimacy to the commercial Internet as something more than a digital ATM for billionaires. When Mark Zuckerberg prepared the initial public offering for Facebook in 2012, he wrote to potential investors that Facebook “was not originally created to be a company.” Instead, “it was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.”56 Internet Service Providers: From Monopoly to Cartel?

Given their extraordinary size and wealth and the corruption of the political system, they should have commensurate political power in Washington in short order. Some sense of the rapidly growing power of the digital giants comes when one looks at international politics, where the giants play a foundational role. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was invited to the 2011 G8 meetings, where he sat at the table and discussed world politics.92 MacKinnon characterizes “Facebookistan” and “Googledom” as virtual nation-states obsessed with limiting the ability of governments anywhere to interfere with their profitability and growth, which is their driving concern.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

Tmall’s “Singles Day” effort started out with just twenty-seven participating merchants, but it quickly became the most important shopping event in the country, with participants buying presents not only for their single selves, but also for people they’re interested in. On November 11, 2016, Alibaba’s marketplaces enabled sales of $17.8 billion, three times the combined total of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States.# Of the four companies mentioned by Goodwin, though, Facebook might have the most extraordinary story. From its start in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room eleven years earlier, it had grown from a social networking site at a few elite US universities into a global utility of communication, connection, and content, visited daily by 936 million people. As Goodwin pointed out, Facebook drew all these people in and kept them engaged for an average of fifty minutes per day without generating any of the information that appeared on the site.

And Facebook, already a huge and profitable company when Goodwin wrote about it in March of 2015, continued to grow in size and influence, to greatly affect mainstream content producers, and to make sizable investments in innovation. In August of 2015 the web traffic analysis company Parse.ly released a report showing that across the major news and media sites it tracked, more viewers came via Facebook than from Google and other search engines. In March of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the company’s ten-year road map, which included major initiatives in artificial intelligence, virtual reality and augmented reality, and even solar-powered airplanes to bring Internet access to millions of people who live far from any telecommunications infrastructure. How could companies that consisted of only an “indescribably thin layer” be having such an impact, and such success?


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Here’s What He Said,” Recode, April 13, 2016. f 3.Brad Stone and Jack Clark, “Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat,” Bloomberg Technology, March 17, 2016. 4.John Markoff, “Latest to Quit Google’s Self-Driving Car Unit: Top Roboticist,” New York Times, August 5, 2016. 5.Mark Harris, “Secretive Alphabet Division Funded by Google Aims to Fix Public Transit in US,” Guardian, June 27, 2016. 6.Siimon Reynolds, “Why Google Glass Failed: A Marketing Lesson,” Forbes, February 5, 2015. 7.Rajat Agrawal, “Why India Rejected Facebook’s ‘Free’ Version of the Internet,” Mashable, February 9, 2016. 8.Mark Zuckerberg, “The technology behind Aquila,” Facebook, July 21, 2016, facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/the-technology-behind-aquila/10153916136506634/. 9.Mari Saito, “Exclusive: Amazon Expanding Deliveries by Its ‘On-Demand’ Drivers,” Reuters, February 8, 2016. 10.Alan Boyle, “First Amazon Prime Airplane Debuts in Seattle After Secret Night Flight,” GeekWire, August 4, 2016. 11.Farhad Manjoo, “Think Amazon’s Drone Delivery Idea Is a Gimmick?


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The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

It also boosted the number of M&As, because companies needed to become bigger than before to capture the specialization gains from a growing world economy. There was little demand for innovators and entrepreneurs fanning that “perennial gale of creative destruction,” and that demand naturally declined as companies turned into logistics hubs. Executive recruiters were not scouting for entrepreneurial people like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to take up key positions in multinationals. They wanted executives with specialisms in optimization, management, logistics, capital markets, and other key operative functions of a firm. They wanted trusted partners from the “technostructure” of managerial capitalism, to quote John Kenneth Galbraith.6 And these partners were planners, not entrepreneurs.

A successful company-builder like Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, for example, differentiates between Class A and Class B common stocks.27 When first introduced, Class B shares traded for 1/30th of Class A’s stock price and carried lower voting rights. Both Google and Facebook have dual share structures, something that has arguably helped to maintain a culture of innovation in those firms. A few days after Facebook’s initial public offering, founder Mark Zuckerberg owned 18 percent of Facebook, but controlled 57 percent of the share-votes.28 The reason is obvious: maintaining entrepreneurial grit. Ownership differentiation is a red rag for many in corporate finance. Regulators do not like it either and tend to root for ownership democracy. In Europe, authorities have made efforts to remove ownership discrimination, and less than a decade ago there was a political campaign to rule out dual class stocks entirely.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

He said: ‘This is a very good place for a small person to be.’ ” Most of us, Pohjakallio said, are small people, not in the sense that we are lesser than others, but in the sense that we find satisfaction and purpose in small, steady accomplishments in our work rather than being saddled with vague and grandiose expectations. “In the US, Mark Zuckerberg seems to work all the time and demands the same from his workforce,” Pohjakallio said. “But he is not the role model of future business leaders. The CEO of Snellman, well, yes, maybe he’s the one we should be looking up to. Work cannot be measured in hours spent, it must be measured in things accomplished, and accomplishing those things and making meaning of them takes thought.

“there may have been a time and a place for unions” Kevin Rose, “Silicon Valley’s Anti-Unionism, Now with a Side of Class Warfare,” New York Magazine, July 2013. Still, it’s worth pointing out that not a few of these new economy employers recognize the value of collective action in pursuit of their own goals. Consider, for example, the sudden involvement of industrial leadership in immigration reform. In April 2013, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg collaborated on the launch of Fwd.us, a proimmigration collective whose members included Bill Gates, Google’s Eric Schmidt, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist and billionaire John Doerr. narrows the gap between the highest and lowest earners Derek C. Jones, “The Ombudsman: Employee Ownership as a Mechanism to Enhance Corporate Governance and Moderate Executive Pay Levels,” Interfaces 43, no. 6 (December 1, 2013): 599–601, https://doi.org/​10.1287/​inte.2013.0709.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

There are legendary professors and we scramble to recruit their graduating students. But it’s also considered the height of hipness to eschew a traditional degree and unequivocally prove yourself through other means. The list of top company runners who dropped out of college is commanding: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Mark Zuckerberg, for a start. Peter Thiel, of Facebook and PayPal fame, started a fund to pay top students to drop out of school, since the task of building high-tech startups should not be delayed. Mea culpa. I never earned a real degree (though I have received honorary ones). In my case poverty played a role, as it did for many others.

FIFTH INTERLUDE The Wise Old Man in the Clouds THE LIMITS OF EMERGENCE AS AN EXPLANATION In 2012, the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution, themed its recruitment campaign on the idea that Christianity is like Facebook. One of the slogans was “Our CEO mastered social networking 2,000 years before Mark Zuckerberg was born.”1 There’s something to the comparison, and I find that worrisome. Each institution became powerful in an unconventional way. Each network created a center of power that bypassed territorial and political boundaries, and existed on its own plane. Each became what might be called a “social monopoly,” engaging in social engineering on a grand scale.


pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

It was in 2004 that Tim O’Reilly first coined the phrase “Web 2.0” when attempting to define the intersection of the web and applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centred design, and collaboration.2 Facebook launched in 2003, but MySpace was the dominant social media platform in the US at this time. iTV bought the Friends Reunited network in 2003 as it climbed past the 15-million user mark. It was also in 2003 that YouTube first started its video storing/retrieval service. In 2005 News Corp purchased MySpace for $580 million3 and Viacom offered Mark Zuckerberg $75 million for the rapidly growing Facebook service.4 In 2006 they returned with an offer of $1.5 billion. When that deal fell through, Yahoo tried a counter-offer of $1 billion—unsurprisingly it was declined. By 2007, when Apple released the iPhone, Facebook was already outperforming MySpace in terms of monthly visitors.

Well, Twitter wasn’t launched at SXSW, but its “buzz” and rapid growth are often attributed to its appearance at SXSW in 2007. Foursquare launched at SXSW, along with a bunch of other start-ups and apps. In 2006, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Craig Newmark from Craigslist were the primary speakers. In 2008, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook took the stage, and in 2010, Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter, was the primary personality on the interactive stage. Figure 8.11: PanelPicker at SXSW is a great example of structured crowdsourcing (Credit: SXSW) However, SXSW uses crowdsourcing to select most of the topics for its interactive week.


pages: 540 words: 119,731

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

And many see it as an urgent concern. * * * — IN FACT, SAMSUNG HAS no equivalent among its Silicon Valley peers. Nor does the company have Silicon Valley’s rebellious, counterculture origins. There is no marijuana-smoking college-dropout equivalent of Steve Jobs; there is no mischievous Mark Zuckerberg, ranking co-eds on his dorm room website. There is no flamboyant engineer like Sony’s Akio Morita, who survived World War II, co-founded the company in a bombed-out department store, and drove its success. Sitting down for interviews in Seoul, I was often met with looks of suspicion and distrust—even terror.

In the scheme of things, it was an inexpensive way to build word of mouth. “To some extent it was pay to play. Or we would ‘host’ the events with already-friendly partners,” said a marketer on the team. Samsung hosted a celebrity dinner party at the estate of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—the twins who sued Mark Zuckerberg claiming he took their ideas to create Facebook. On a swanky terrace overlooking an infinity pool and the Hollywood Hills, a Samsung representative was waiting for Dana Brunetti, Galaxy S III ready to go, customized with a background picture of the producer’s name. Yeah, I’m going back to the iPhone as soon as dinner’s over, Brunetti thought.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

Employees frequently cried at their desks, trapped in something bearing an uncanny resemblance to the ups and downs of an abusive relationship. 28 At Facebook, things were a little bit different—at least according to Kate Losse, who detailed her experience as one of the company’s early nontechnical employees in her memoir, The Boy Kings . But the sense of awe at the power in her hands was the same, at least before Losse’s eventual disillusionment and break with Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. The work that Losse did—customer service work—was devalued from the very start by Zuckerberg, who fetishized hackers and Ivy Leaguers who he imagined were crafted in his own image. “Move fast and break things,” was his motto, and moving fast and breaking things were things that boys did. Losse nevertheless worked her way in, figuring, “You can’t run a successful company with boys alone.” 29 Losse befriended the “hacker boys,” including one particular teenager who was hired after he hacked Facebook itself.

Programming might be destined not to be a prestige field for wizards and boy kings, but rather, as Clive Thompson of Wired wrote, “the next big blue-collar job.” Some of the boot camps are out-and-out scams, like one that promises to pay you to learn—and then takes a cut of your salary for the next two years. But all of them will have the effect of making coders more common, and thus making the work less rarefied—and less well remunerated. 37 Mark Zuckerberg also has a plan to bring in lots of short-term workers from overseas. His immigration nonprofit, FWD.us, was created to lobby for immigration reform. That sounded nice in the age of Trump, but Zuckerberg’s main concern was increasing the number of H1-B guestworker visas for skilled workers. H1-B workers are tethered to a particular job; if they quit or get fired, they have to leave the country, which makes them spectacularly compliant as well as cheaper to hire. 38 All of this means that tech workers might have more in common with the industrial workers of midcentury than they might think.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

Among the many foreigners who deserve credit for key elements of the Great Inventions are transplanted Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell for the telephone, Frenchmen Louis Pasteur for the germ theory of disease and Louis Lumière for the motion picture, Englishmen Joseph Lister for antiseptic surgery and David Hughes for early wireless experiments, and Germans Karl Benz for the internal combustion engine and Heinrich Hertz for key inventions that made possible the 1896 wireless patents of the recent Italian immigrant Guglielmo Marconi. The role of foreign inventors in the late nineteenth century was distinctly more important than it was one hundred years later, when the personal computer and Internet revolution was led almost uniformly by Americans, including Paul Allen, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg. Among the pioneering giants of the Internet age, Sergei Brin (co-founder of Google) is one of the few to have been born abroad. Organization. The book proper begins with chapter 2, on living conditions in 1870. Part I includes eight chapters (chapters 2–9) on the revolutionary advances in the standard of living through 1940, a dividing year chosen both because it is halfway between 1870 and 2010 and because 1940 marks the year of the first Census of Housing, with its detailed quantitative measures of housing and its equipment.

If 90 percent of the people with whom you interact speak English and only 10 percent speak French, then it is quite likely that you will work harder to perfect your English than your French. Thus the power of social media is determined by the popularity of the platform. In 2005, only 8 percent of adults said they used social media. A service called Myspace was then the leading social media network, and Facebook, created by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard dorm room, was still only a year old. Eight years later, in 2013, social media use in adults had reached 72 percent. Teenagers and young adults had an adoption rate of close to 90 percent. Many business interactions still remain focused on e-mail, but social networks dominate personal interactions.

The chapter begins with a historical overview of the source of inventions since 1870 and emphasizes a U-shaped history in which the role of the individual inventor dominated the late nineteenth century, followed by most of the twentieth century, when major inventions occurred within the research laboratories of giant corporations. After 1975, the individual entrepreneur returned as the modern electronic age was created by individuals such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. Equipped with this historical background, we then examine the quantitative record of progress. The post-1970 years have not witnessed a uniformly slow advance of TFP. Instead the impact on TFP of the inventions of IR #3 were centered on the decade 1994–2004. We describe changes in business practices in the office, in the retail sector, and in the banking and financial sector and find in all cases that current methods of production had been largely achieved by 2004.


pages: 165 words: 45,397

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

The design collective Metahaven has developed a sustained critique of neoliberalism through a series of uncorporate identities for imaginary corporategovernment states by subverting branding and corporate identity strategies from a graphic design perspective.18 Their Facestate (2011) installation for Graphic Design: Now in Production at the Walker Art Center explored parallels between social software and the state: "It is about politicians hailing the entrepreneurship of Mark Zuckerberg, about the neoliberal dream of minimal government interference, about the governance of social networks, about face recognition, about debt, about the future of money and currency in social networks, and about the dream of total participation. "19 Metahaven combines extensive research with the setting out of fictional corporate government hybrids through design.


pages: 170 words: 45,121

Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

collective bargaining, game design, Garrett Hardin, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Tragedy of the Commons

What they know is you type something in a box and stuff appears.2 But it doesn’t matter to them: They’re muddling through and using the thing successfully. 2 Usually a box with the word “Google” next to it. A lot of people think Google is the Internet. And muddling through is not limited to beginners. Even technically savvy users often have surprising gaps in their understanding of how things work. (I wouldn’t be surprised if even Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin have some bits of technology in their lives that they use by muddling through.) Why does this happen? It’s not important to us. For most of us, it doesn’t matter to us whether we understand how things work, as long as we can use them. It’s not for lack of intelligence, but for lack of caring.


pages: 199 words: 43,653

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

Products with higher user engagement also have the potential to grow faster than their rivals. Case in point: Facebook leapfrogged its competitors, including MySpace and Friendster, even though it was relatively late to the social networking party. Although its competitors both had healthy growth rates and millions of users by the time Mark Zuckerberg’s fledgling site launched beyond the closed doors of academia, his company came to dominate the industry. Facebook’s success was, in part, a result of what I call the more is more principle—more frequent usage drives more viral growth. As David Skok, tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, points out, “The most important factor to increasing growth is . . .


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

CHANGING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE FIRM Throughout the first era of the Internet, management thinkers (Don included) talked up the networked enterprise, the flat corporation, open innovation, and business ecosystems as successors to the hierarchies of industrial power. However, the architecture of the early-twentieth-century corporation remains pretty much intact. Even the big dot-coms adopted a top-down structure with such decision makers as Jeff Bezos, Marissa Mayer, and Mark Zuckerberg. So why would any established firm—particularly ones that make their money off other people’s data, operate largely behind closed doors, and suffer surprisingly little in data breach after data breach—want to leverage blockchain technologies to distribute power, increase transparency, respect user privacy and anonymity, and include far more people who can afford far less than those already served?

Twister leverages the free software implementations of bitcoin and BitTorrent protocols and deploys cryptography end to end so that no government can spy on users’ communications.41 GETTING THE WORD OUT: THE CRITICAL ROLE OF EDUCATION Joichi Ito is among an elite group of widely successful entrepreneurs—from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to Biz Stone and Mark Zuckerberg—who dropped out of college to invent something new in the digital economy.42 It is a hallmark of our entrepreneurial culture that one’s pursuit of an idea, to go deep and understand its nuances as Ito likes to say, drives a visionary out of the classroom and into business. Henry Ford and Walt Disney pursued their passions without college degrees.


pages: 441 words: 136,954

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

SEVEN Average Is Over We have a bone to pick with the writers of the movie The Social Network. We take exception to the way they depicted Lawrence Summers, who was the president of Harvard at the time in which the movie is set. At one point, two Harvard students, the twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, go to Summers complaining that a fellow student, Mark Zuckerberg, has stolen their idea for something called “the Facebook.” Summers hears the twins’ tale of woe without a shred of sympathy, then tosses them out with this piece of advice: “Yes, everyone at Harvard is inventing something. Harvard undergraduates believe that inventing a job is better than finding one, so I’ll suggest again that the two of you come up with a new, new project.”

“Show me an obstacle and I will show you an opportunity” is still the motto of many, many Americans, be they business entrepreneurs or civic and charitable entrepreneurs. So Rosa Parks just got on that bus and took her seat; so new immigrants just went out and started 25 percent of the new companies in Silicon Valley in the last decade; so college dropouts named Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg just got up and created four of the biggest companies in the world. So, when all seemed lost in the Iraq war, the U.S. military carried out a surge, not a retreat, because, as one of the officers involved told Tom, “We were just too dumb to quit.” It was never in the plan, but none of them got the word.


pages: 411 words: 127,755

Advertisers at Work by Tracy Tuten

accounting loophole / creative accounting, centre right, content marketing, crowdsourcing, follow your passion, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, QR code, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

And we have a little line that everyone here has to learn and learn what it means. It’s simply, “Make friends, not ads.” That’s what we try to get the organization to do: think not about this thing you’re about to create, but think, how do you help a brand and its publics become friends. We’ve been actually doing that long before Mark Zuckerberg took the word “friends” and did something with it—before he could probably shave. Anyway, that’s our philosophy, and we actually have an interesting organizational structure. We have no profit centers between any of our disciplines. We don’t have any sort of wholly owned subsidiaries. We have T-shaped subject matter people3 who can flow all around the organization and work on anything they want as long as what they’re providing is relevant, without worrying about where the budget is going.

I personally am a big believer, even though some people don’t agree with me, that the future creative person is going to come as much from other areas as they do from the traditional writer, art director, and the crafts. In fact, if you look at the biggest cultural influencers of the last three or four years, who are they? They’re the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, right? Programmers and nerds—not necessarily who we consider traditional communicators. Tuten: Right. Boches: They’re Ev Williams, they’re Steve Chen, they’re the guys who are inventing things like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. They aren’t writers and art directors. They’re programmers.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

Business books sell in the millions. “When I was in college, guys usually pretended they were in a band,” one observer has commented. “Now they pretend they are in a startup.” Americans are unusually comfortable with the risk-taking that is at the heart of entrepreneurialism. The rewards for success can be huge—Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire before he was thirty—while the punishments for failure are often trivial. In some countries bankruptcy spells social death. In the United States, particularly in Silicon Valley, it is a badge of honor. Monitor, a consultancy, discovered that 96 percent of Americans who responded to its survey said that it was common for people who had failed in business to try again, compared with just 16 percent in Austria.4 The United States also has several structural advantages when it comes to entrepreneurship.

CHAPTER 6: RETHINKING THE COMPANY 1. Auletta, Googled, pp. 17–18. 2. Martin Thomas, Loose: The Future of Business Is Letting Go (London: Headline, 2011), pp. 181–82. 3. Auletta, Googled, p. 21. 4. Steven Levy, “Larry Page wants to return Google to its startup roots,” Wired, March 18, 2011. 5. Auletta, Googled, p. 15. 6. Mark Zuckerberg, speech at Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, June 23, 2010. 7. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World (New York: Portfolio, 2010), p. 253. 8. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007). 9.


pages: 430 words: 135,418

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

Venture capitalists (VCs), meanwhile, ran funds that raised millions of dollars with the goal of investing in such startups, then cashing out—either through acquisition of the startup by a bigger company or else through an initial public offering at some point during the fund’s lifetime (typically eight to twelve years). In those early days, a software-based startup, such as Facebook, was judged on its expanding user base rather than its profit. Mark Zuckerberg’s social network didn’t turn a profit until five years after he founded it in his Harvard University dorm room, still years before its IPO. Amazon went nearly a decade before turning an annual profit; meanwhile it spent its cash to grow its user base and build unparalleled logistics and digital infrastructure systems.

It was a position that would prove notoriously, almost comically difficult for Musk to keep filled; he didn’t seem to have much interest in the advice of his lawyers. One thing Tesla elected not to do when preparing for public ownership, which would have ramifications years later, was introduce a dual-class stock system. This was what allowed Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google (or Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook two years later) to keep control of their company, even as they held a small fraction of its total stock. It’s unclear why Tesla’s IPO paperwork, which it filed in January 2010, contained no such provision to ensure Musk’s continued oversight of the company. Those who worked on it said the idea was omitted, in part, because selling Tesla as an investment was already going to be hard enough.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

The corporatist controllers with the money and political aspirations that are running the United States are families and people like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Koch, Bezos, Gates, Buffet, Du Pont, Vanderbilt, Mellon, Ford, Walton, Soros, Kissinger, Adelson, Sergey Brin & Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, and others. Families such as these have either been running the country for decades or are a new breed of wealthy technocrats that are stepping up to replace the older ruling families. Their money funds programs pushing to relax restrictions on things like oil drilling, the deregulation of industries they seek to expand into, the regulation of industries that they wish to lock others out of, and the ability to keep their operations as secret as possible.

The people in charge will not be leaving witnesses to their crimes. Members of the Permanent State would be people like Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates, Sheldon Adelson, George Soros, The Bush & Clinton families, John Brennan, James Comey, Rupert Murdoch, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Barack Obama, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, and many more names that most people would never recognize. A new generation of Permanent State swamp monsters is stealing the headlines these days as they work to take control of industries, like Jeff Bezos, who owns the bulk of Amazon. His ownership stake in Amazon is worth well over $100 billion, part of which he used to purchase the Washington Post.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

And then they expressed outrage—and utter incredulity—when they got carted away. The fantasy and the reality had become one and the same.” Notably, Bannon appears to have no desire to make Dave’s life better, to help him lead a life from which he would not need to escape. Rather, his goal seems to be to turn reality into a game played with live ammunition. If Mark Zuckerberg’s plans for the “Metaverse” proceed as he hopes, with all of us represented by personalized animated avatars to our banks and our friends, this is only going to get more confusing. It already is. In March 2022, South Korea elected Yoon Suk-yeol as its new president. The conservative politician campaigned, in part, by seeding the internet with a deepfake version of himself, known as AI Yoon.

Billionaires, heads of state, A-list celebrities, journalists, and members of various royal families gather every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, just as they do in Aspen, Colorado, and just as they did in Manhattan at the Clinton Global Initiative—Google even runs an invitation-only annual “summer camp” in Sicily where you are as likely to bump into Mark Zuckerberg as Katy Perry. In every case, they take up the mantle of solving the world’s problems—climate breakdown, infectious diseases, hunger—with no mandate and no public involvement and, most notably, no shame about their own central roles in creating and sustaining these crises. Knowing that this kind of unmasked plutocracy can take root in democratic societies without so much as an effort to hide it is like being forced to watch your spouse cheat on you when that is not your kink.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

Instead of living in the isolated and rather spooky unfurnished Woodside mansion, the couple moved into a charming and unpretentious house on a corner in a family-friendly neighborhood in old Palo Alto. It was a privileged realm—neighbors would eventually include the visionary venture capitalist John Doerr, Google’s founder Larry Page, and Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, along with Andy Hertzfeld and Joanna Hoffman—but the homes were not ostentatious, and there were no high hedges or long drives shielding them from view. Instead, houses were nestled on lots next to each other along flat, quiet streets flanked by wide sidewalks. “We wanted to live in a neighborhood where kids could walk to see friends,” Jobs later said.

In February 2011, Doerr began making plans to host a small dinner for President Obama in Silicon Valley. He and Jobs, along with their wives, went to dinner at Evvia, a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto, to draw up a tight guest list. The dozen chosen tech titans included Google’s Eric Schmidt, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Cisco’s John Chambers, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Genentech’s Art Levinson, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings. Jobs’s attention to the details of the dinner extended to the food. Doerr sent him the proposed menu, and he responded that some of the dishes proposed by the caterer—shrimp, cod, lentil salad—were far too fancy “and not who you are, John.”

What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great. I tried to be as helpful as I could. I will continue to do that with people like Mark Zuckerberg too. That’s how I’m going to spend part of the time I have left. I can help the next generation remember the lineage of great companies here and how to continue the tradition. The Valley has been very supportive of me. I should do my best to repay. The announcement of Jobs’s 2011 medical leave prompted others to make a pilgrimage to the house in Palo Alto.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

Which means that the “greater fools” chiefly targeted by venture capitalists to buy their unicorns are not you and I and millions of others in a possibly hallucinogenic NASDAQ public market but rather a tiny elite of cagey bidders counseled by game theory quants. The oligopsonists include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Google’s alphabetic Larry Page, Disney’s Robert Iger, Verizon’s Lowell McAdam, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, and Apple’s Tim Cook. None seems a good bet for a gaggle of gulls. What is really going on is the displacement of the open and rabble-run IPO market by an exclusive game of horse trading among the most exalted elite of “qualified investors,” the owners of the leviathans of the last generation of IPOs.


Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, Elizabeth Truss

Airbnb, banking crisis, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clockwatching, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, fail fast, fear of failure, financial engineering, glass ceiling, informal economy, James Dyson, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, long peace, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neil Kinnock, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, pension reform, price stability, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, tech worker, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

But blaming the superficiality of the celebrity culture should not become a substitute for tackling a far deeper problem. People will always be attracted to shortcuts that offer a rapid ascent to fortune and fame. In interviews, Lord Sugar often makes the point that young entrepreneurs too often expect the one in a million success of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, rather than the hard grind of most business.54 He is equally quick to lambast what he calls the ‘cushy’ benefits system for generating an ‘expectancy culture’.55 Sugar is an example of a dwindling breed of self-made UK entrepreneurs who started out from modest beginnings, with few qualifications, and built up businesses to be internationally competitive.


pages: 196 words: 54,339

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The Soviets’ launch of the Sputnik satellite in the 1960s led America to begin offering advanced math in high school Alvin Powell, “How Sputnik Changed U.S. Education,” Harvard Gazette, October 11, 2007. 27. For these reasons, many of the most ambitious engineers, developers, and entrepreneurs end up dropping out of college altogether Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Williams, Travis Kalanick, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, John Mackey, Jan Koum, to name only a few. 28. Consider Thomas Jefferson’s famous invention, the dumbwaiter Silvio A. Bedini, Thomas Jefferson: Statesman of Science (Basing­stoke: Palgrave–MacMillan, 1990). Even today, Chinese laborers “finish” smartphones by wiping off any fingerprints Victoria Turk, “China’s Workers Need Help to Fight Factories’ Toxic Practices,” New Scientist, March 22, 2017. 29.


pages: 184 words: 53,625

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

The state plays a key role, but that role is limited to establishing rewards and incentives that encourage better—and more collaborative—teaching. — In February 2012, Facebook filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, justifying and describing its plans for an initial public offering. The document included a revealing letter from Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, outlining the company’s core mission and warning potential shareholders that the company would prioritize that long-term mission over short-term opportunities to increase the share price. The Facebook mission can be boiled down to the old E. M. Forster slogan: “Only connect.” The company wants to strengthen the social ties that allow humans around the planet to connect, organize, converse, and share.


Science...For Her! by Megan Amram

Albert Einstein, blood diamond, butterfly effect, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, double helix, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, pez dispenser, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Wall-E, wikimedia commons

Penview was the “son of Dr. Ryan Penview, a third-generation ophthalmologist, and Mrs. Claire Penview, a Zuckerberg-ass beaver-bitch.” Mrs. Penview practiced law in New York State until 2004, and is considered by many to be a friendly and beautiful member of her community, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to Mark Zuckerberg or his rear end. “Beaver-bitch” is not a profession. We mischaracterized the bride as having worn “a peace [sic] of shit mayonnaise tent. Also, you know how sometimes people see the Virgin Mary in stuff? It was like that, except you could see Hitler in the wedding dress, but specifically because she had hand-embroidered a picture of Hitler in her dress.”


pages: 209 words: 53,175

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

But the majority of Benjamin Graham’s investing success was due to owning an enormous chunk of GEICO stock which, by his own admission, broke nearly every diversification rule that Graham himself laid out in his famous texts. Where does the thin line between bold and reckless fall here? I don’t know. Graham wrote about his GEICO bonanza: “One lucky break, or one supremely shrewd decision—can we tell them apart?” Not easily. We similarly think Mark Zuckerberg is a genius for turning down Yahoo!’s 2006 $1 billion offer to buy his company. He saw the future and stuck to his guns. But people criticize Yahoo! with as much passion for turning down its own big buyout offer from Microsoft—those fools should have cashed out while they could! What is the lesson for entrepreneurs here?


pages: 173 words: 55,328

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional

The demand could produce a flowering of new outlets that will attract talented newcomers as well as refugees from established media as it increasingly loses its way. We need journalists who are rewarded when they refrain from scratching their Twitter itch and discover their fellow Americans. We need journalism that is independent and imaginative enough to go to places that Mark Zuckerberg never sees. We need citizens who can listen to one another while thinking for themselves. And we need to affirm the value of free expression for any of this to matter. * * * Our idea of activism has come down to the act of protest. It’s an indispensable civic tool for dramatizing a cause, heightening social tensions, and claiming the attention of those in power.


pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

despite Facebook’s superior user data Jim Edwards, “DATA: Google Totally Blows Away Facebook on Ad Performance,” Business Insider, last modified May 15, 2012, accessed March 9, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/​data-google-totally-blows-away-facebook-on-ad-performance-2012-5 . A 2013 survey of 395 large-company marketers by Forrester Research revealed that Facebook created “less business value than any other digital marketing opportunity.” See Nate Elliott, “An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg,” October 28, 2013, accessed June 6, 2016, http://blogs.forrester.com/​nate_elliott/​13-10-28-an_open_letter_to_mark_zuckerberg . The Affluent Society John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society , 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). of desirable information One of the first papers to offer a formal theory for the informative (matching) effect of advertising is Gene Grossman and Carl Shapiro, “Informative Advertising with Differentiated Products,” The Review of Economic Studies 51, no. 1 (1984): 63–81.


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

As the personal-computer industry progressed, the garage gave way to the college dorm room as the symbolic locus for IT entrepreneurial activity. Freshman Bill Gates left Harvard University to co-found Microsoft, freshman Shawn Fanning left Northeastern University to co-found Napster, and freshman Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard University to found Facebook. (Facebook is discussed in Chapter 12.) Another freshman, Michael Dell, stands out from these other teenagers—for his University of Texas dorm room was not merely the location of early-planning and prototype design but also the initial site of product assembly.

These firms, both of which were founded in California and initially focused on the United States, allowed users to create individual public- or semipublic-profile web pages and to connect with others. Friendster and MySpace grew rapidly in their first half-decade and gained millions of users, but in recent years they have been greatly overshadowed by industry-leading Facebook. Harvard University freshman Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook—then called Thefacebook—in his shared Kirkland House dorm suite. Frequently occupied with designing and programming computer applications during his first semester, Zuckerberg created two hit programs. The first, Course Match, enabled students to match up classes with others; the second, Facemash, allowed students to compare and choose (based on attractiveness) between two Harvard freshmen portrait photos.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In 1919, as Panama was taking its first steps setting up its ask-no-questions ship registry, Veblen summarised how the game worked: ‘In this international competition the machinery and policy of the state are in a peculiar degree drawn into the service of the larger business interests; so that, both in commerce and industrial enterprise, the business men of one nation are pitted against those of another and swing the forces of the state, legislative, diplomatic, and military, against one another in the strategic game of pecuniary advantage.’ These are ‘channels of sabotage’, he said, wrapped up in the flag. To help the national champions ‘compete’ on a global stage, the common man must shoulder the burden. The idea of national champions is a recurring theme in economic history. When Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook was grilled by the US Senate in April 2018 over privacy violations, photos of his crib notes revealed this: ‘US tech companies key asset for America; break up strengthens Chinese companies.’ This kind of nonsense – an apparent call to leave his monopoly alone to profitably harvest and sell valuable and sensitive data about American users in the interests of national security – was summarised by Veblen in his usual style.

At the top of the 2018 list sits Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, the everything-monopoly. Next comes Bill Gates, who created the Windows quasi-monopoly, followed by Warren Buffett, the portfolio monopolist who openly admits that he only tends to invest in businesses that have little competition. There’s Mark Zuckerberg, the social network monopolist of Facebook, in fifth position, and Mexico’s uber-monopolist Carlos Slim, now pushed down to seventh place by the new giants of technology. All these people have made their fortunes as a result of the evisceration or lack of anti-monopoly laws or enforcement, the rise of offshore finance, the financialisation of Western and other economies and the general retreat of government.


pages: 535 words: 149,752

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Jobs had sparked the architectural bonanza in 2010 when he had Foster + Partners begin work on the closed loop that seemed like a physical manifestation of Apple’s culture of secrecy and control. Facebook had followed, with the architect Frank Gehry designing a campus of community coffee shops and offices lined with plywood, an informal homage to its hoodie-wearing CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Not to be outdone, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had tapped the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels to imagine a soaring glass canopy over a public walkway, a nod to the accessibility of information its search engine made possible. The glitzy headquarters followed a long line of monuments to wealth and power that dated all the way back to Egypt’s pharaohs.

The 175 acres Apple had bought had been abandoned by Hewlett-Packard after the PC market stagnated. Facebook had taken over the fossilized remains of Sun Microsystems’ headquarters, which had been completed in 2000, just as the dot-com implosion had devastated Sun’s business. After taking over the campus in 2011, Mark Zuckerberg had left Sun’s sign visible to remind employees about the risks of becoming comfortable with success. Apple’s high-priced headquarters raised fears that the same thing might happen to it. The park the iPhone built was completed ten years after the company’s best-selling product had debuted. The device still accounted for two-thirds of the company’s sales, and the Apple Watch, AirPods, and other new products had yet to achieve comparable unit sales.


pages: 506 words: 151,753

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze by Laura Shin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Airbnb, altcoin, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, cloud computing, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, DevOps, digital nomad, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial independence, Firefox, general-purpose programming language, gravity well, hacker house, Hacker News, holacracy, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Internet of things, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, litecoin, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, off-the-grid, performance metric, Potemkin village, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social distancing, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks

Gustav Simonsson, a programmer who’d been watching Ethereum but had thought that its token sale might be a scam, attended and realized that many of the people involved had PhDs, such as Gavin, Christian Reitwießner, and Jutta Steiner, who had a PhD in math and years at McKinsey & Company; she was managing security and audits. Plus, Vitalik had just won the 2014 World Technology Award for IT software, beating out Mark Zuckerberg, among others. Gustav cast aside his doubts to work with Jutta on security. The developers entered a heavy work period. Every day, Jeff would wake up in his small Amsterdam West apartment, walk his bull terrier Bruce, drink coffee, and then code until bedtime, with a break for dinner. In Germany, Christoph, who mostly worked remotely from his small town, Mittweida (population fifteen thousand), but occasionally went into the Berlin office, initially found a lot of exploits that could break the protocol—usually in Jeffrey’s Go client, since Gavin had written the yellow paper.12 As time went on, there were fewer and fewer bugs.

She eventually became managing director of Kraken in Japan. By the end of 2017, Ethereum had a roughly $70 billion market cap, and Vitalik himself was a centimillionaire; he’d been named to the Fortune 40 Under 40 list alongside the likes of Emmanuel Macron, Marie Kondo, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Tim Ferriss, and he’d even beaten Mark Zuckerberg (among others) for the World Technology Award.33 He could have done a proper executive search and attracted someone with experience stewarding an open-source technology. In fact, in these last months of 2017, Bob Summerwill was giving Vitalik recommendations around the transition from Ming, advocating that the EF have things like an elected community board, full transparency, defined governance, and the like—typical professional structural features appropriate for an organization shepherding the development of a decentralized technology.


pages: 285 words: 58,517

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Technology evolves at a lightning pace and, with it, its applications. Even more of our everyday lives is converting to a digital or digitally supported experience. In March 2014, Facebook purchased virtual reality technology company Oculus VR for $2 billion. According to reports, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg instigated the deal. Zuckerberg described his first time using the VR headset as revelatory: “When you put on the goggles, it’s different from anything I have ever experienced in my life.”3 But more than that, Zuckerberg was on the lookout for the next major ecosystem that would support human interaction.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

The most important example of this is how we think about economic growth in the West. We still measure our health in aggregate numbers. But averages are useless. As Robert H. Frank, the Cornell economist, points out, on average we have about 1.9 legs each, because some people have only one leg.14 Likewise, if Mark Zuckerberg joins your neighbourhood football team, every member is on average a billionaire. Under the old model, where most production was clustered behind national barriers, what was good for General Motors was good for America. The annual gross domestic product figure meant as much to GM’s American customers as it did to the company.


pages: 195 words: 58,462

City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World by Catie Marron

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, do-ocracy, fixed-gear, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, plutocrats, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning

Facebook is a company that hates silos—so much so that the footbridges have supermarket-style doors that automatically open to let people pass. On the street level, there is an open-plan glass-windowed office exposed to the square, with a sign declaring “Do Not Feed the Animals”; this is where Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg himself works. In the center of the space, in the spot where a fountain or statue might be found in an Italian plaza, there is a small yellow crane. Zuckerberg and the other engineers first stumbled on this piece of metal in the early days of Facebook, in an earlier warehouse office, and started using it as an impromptu stage for their so-called hackathons, or all-night coding rituals.


pages: 199 words: 56,243

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, cloud computing, El Camino Real, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PalmPilot, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple

Bill had been a transcendent figure in the technology business since moving west in 1983, playing a critical role in the success of Apple, Google, Intuit, and numerous other companies. To say he was tremendously respected would be a gross understatement—loved is more like it. Among the audience that day were dozens of technology leaders—Larry Page. Sergey Brin. Mark Zuckerberg. Sheryl Sandberg. Tim Cook. Jeff Bezos. Mary Meeker. John Doerr. Ruth Porat. Scott Cook. Brad Smith. Ben Horowitz. Marc Andreessen. Such a concentration of industry pioneers and power is rarely seen, at least not in Silicon Valley. We—Jonathan Rosenberg and Eric Schmidt—sat among the audience, making subdued small talk, soft sunshine contrasting with the somber mood.


pages: 177 words: 56,657

Be Obsessed or Be Average by Grant Cardone

Albert Einstein, benefit corporation, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, fear of failure, job-hopping, Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, white picket fence

But you’re not going to stop. Because history shows that only the obsessed make it—people like Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Elon Musk, Howard Schultz, Oprah, Vincent van Gogh, Steve Jobs, Christopher Columbus, Charlie Chaplin, Mozart, Michelangelo, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Jay Z, Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and on and on. There is no shortage of these people, and like them or hate them, admire them or detest them, we all know them! Whether or not you agree with their missions or how they got there, you can’t deny that they were obsessed—and that’s why you know their names.


pages: 196 words: 55,862

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy by Callum Cant

Airbnb, algorithmic management, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, deskilling, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, future of work, gamification, gig economy, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invention of the steam engine, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, tech worker, union organizing, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

He wants to ‘play the game of business as if people matter’.4 To work out how to do that, O’Reilly variously cites Jonathan Hall (an economist at Uber), Professor Andrei Haigu (in the Harvard Business Review), Simon Rothmans (venture capitalist), Tom Perez (secretary of labor under Obama), Steven Hill (of the Google-backed New America think tank), and Jose Alvarez (ex-CEO). His positive examples of social change are those luminaries of human emancipation, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.5 His argument represents, in short, the ideas of the bleeding-heart ruling class. His analysis of working conditions at a global platform like Uber begins with a very specific element of US employment law: that when employees work for over 30 hours a week, employers have a responsibility to pay a full-time benefits package.


pages: 330 words: 59,335

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, book value, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, Claude Shannon: information theory, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Henry Singleton, impact investing, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, NetJets, Norman Mailer, oil shock, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, shared worldview, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Teledyne, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, value engineering, vertical integration

They rarely appeared on the covers of business publications and did not write books of management advice. They were not cheerleaders or marketers or backslappers, and they did not exude charisma. They were very different from high-profile CEOs such as Steve Jobs or Sam Walton or Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines or Mark Zuckerberg. These geniuses are the Isaac Newtons of business, struck apple-like by enormously powerful ideas that they proceed to execute with maniacal focus and determination. Their situations and circumstances, however, are not remotely similar (nor are the lessons from their careers remotely transferable) to those of the vast majority of business executives.


pages: 232 words: 63,846

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares

Airbnb, content marketing, Firefox, Hacker News, if you build it, they will come, jimmy wales, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Salesforce, side project, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, software as a service, TechCrunch disrupt, the long tail, the payments system, Uber for X, Virgin Galactic, web application, working poor, Y Combinator

It’s relatively easy to get started in this channel. Start by giving free talks to small groups of potential customers or partners. Speaking at small events can improve your speaking ability, give you some early traction, and spread your story or message. It’s also good for personal growth if you’ve never done it before: Mark Zuckerberg has talked about how improving at public speaking has vastly improved his management ability. We recommend trying to give at least one talk even if you choose not to pursue this traction channel. Dan Martell is the founder of Clarity, an advice platform that connects founders with successful entrepreneurs.


pages: 196 words: 61,981

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

We talk about the Silicon Valley hubris that keeps people from digging too deeply into Chinese technology with an honest look: Silicon Valley is the peak of innovation, so how could another place surpass it? On the other side of hubris is a rhetorical trap: China as a constructed enemy for the American government, in order for it to catalyze domestic support for a range of policies by inciting old-fashioned, U.S.A.-brand nationalism. It’s not surprising that tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg use China as a straw man, arguing that stringent government regulation will prevent American companies from moving fast. Even in narratives of Chinese economic might, China is not innovative; rather, it steals, it cheats, it oppresses. After the People’s Republic of China was founded, science and technology research did take a slow start.


pages: 231 words: 60,546

Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century by Adam, Georgina(Author)

BRICs, Frank Gehry, greed is good, high net worth, inventory management, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

On hand to promote the project were three very glamorous investors in the venture: Chinese-born Wendi Deng, at the time still married to press mogul Rupert Murdoch; former New Yorker editor Tina Brown, and Dasha Zhukova, partner of the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. Deng introduced Cleveland as: ‘A genius – our Mark Zuckerberg,’ referring to the Facebook founder. Then Cleveland – tall, casually dressed in a white shirt with the sleeves turned back – explained to the guests that Artsy would allow art to find a much 119 a changing market wider audience through the internet. He drew a parallel with music: ‘Hundreds of years ago, music was something very few people had access to,’ he said.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

Individual anybodies with good ideas and grit and luck could imagine and then create new businesses and industries. The entrepreneurial instinct has served America well. But as with the three hundred thousand California gold-seekers in 1849–50 who followed the fortunate ten thousand in 1848, as with the American habit of wishfulness in general, a confirmation bias kicks in: from Ben Franklin to Mark Zuckerberg, the stories of the supremely successful entrepreneurs obscure the forgotten millions of losers and nincompoops. The fabulous successes seem like proof of the power of passionate belief in oneself, our American faith in faith. Entrepreneurs exist on a smoke-and-mirrors spectrum, from small-time fabulists to legitimately world-changing visionaries.

The first generation of digital entrepreneurs to get amazingly rich, in the 1980s and ’90s—Gates, Jobs, Bezos—became billionaires in early middle age. In this century, before and after burst bubbles and meltdowns, it happened to younger, digital billionaires at thirty (Larry Page of Google) or twenty-five (Evan Spiegel of Snapchat) or twenty-three (Mark Zuckerberg). Which serves only to make the dream all the dreamier. What’s the new term of art for the most financially successful tech start-ups? Unicorns, after the magical creatures in which only children believe. It’s correct to say that the financial meltdown of 2008 resulted from too much deregulation, too many arcane Wall Street innovations, and some fraud.


pages: 559 words: 169,094

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

It didn’t succeed for various reasons—people turned out not to want to interact through avatars, they wanted to be themselves—but Hoffman continued to refine the idea, and after the sale of PayPal to eBay in 2002, he took his proceeds and launched a social network for businesspeople called LinkedIn. It was through LinkedIn that Hoffman met Sean Parker, and it was through Hoffman and Parker that Thiel met Mark Zuckerberg. In the spring of 2004, Thiel and Hoffman were trying to talk their hyperkinetic twenty-four-year-old friend Parker out of suing Sequoia Capital, the investors in his online address book company, Plaxo. Owing to his libertine ways, Parker had been driven out of his own company, just as he’d been driven out of Napster, the music sharing site, a few years earlier.

Three months later, Parker came back to Thiel with the news that he’d just become president of Thefacebook, a college social network with four employees, and that the Harvard sophomore who had founded it needed money because the number of students clamoring to get on was increasing and would soon overwhelm the computers. Hoffman, who had been tracking Thefacebook and Mark Zuckerberg all year, recused himself from becoming the lead investor because it might be seen as a conflict of interest with LinkedIn. The natural choice was Thiel. Thiel liked to say that, on principle, a hard-core libertarian shouldn’t put his money in social networking. If there was no such thing as society, only individuals, how could there be any return on the investment?


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

I mention them less to establish my credibility as a prognosticator than to show the value of socially funded innovation (every company I mentioned was built on technologies pioneered by government grants or research) and, most important, to show the overwhelming importance of luck in a stagnating economy. Sharing a dorm with the next Mark Zuckerberg is a boon not to be denied, but in the luck department, it really should be enough to be born American. And so it was, before the Boomers took over. Most Americans with moderate talent and ambition could find a good job, buy a home, and invest their savings in the Standard & Poor’s 500, and in doing so, accumulate enough for a comfortable retirement.

On the private side, Facebook, at least in America, is an economically acceptable natural monopoly—it’s a product that gets better as more people use it (a “network effect”), it’s difficult for competitors to re-create and doubtful consumers want a substitute, and there have been no real charges that Mark Zuckerberg has abused his position to dispatch competitors. Still, not all monopolies are natural, and there has been an alarming rise in the market power of megafirms. That is not to say that size automatically guarantees abuse, only that it creates its potential and, given the occupancy of corner offices by Boomers, should alarm.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

During his first run for the presidency back in 1987, Joe Biden ticked off a voter who asked him about his educational qualifications by retorting, ‘I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do … I’d be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours.’8 Boris Johnson has been known to rag David Cameron because he was a King’s Scholar at Eton, a sure sign of mental ability, while Cameron was an Oppidan, or regular fee payer. This is not just froth. The meritocratic idea is shaping society from top to bottom. A growing proportion of great fortunes are in the hands of people with outstanding brain power: computer geeks such as Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) or financial wizards such as George Soros (who pioneered hedge funds) and Jim Simons (who helped to found computer-driven ‘quant investing’).9 The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and makes a point of surrounding himself with academic super-achievers.

They are the Economist rich rather than the Tatler rich. Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist who founded PayPal and was one of the first investors in Facebook, likes to fly provocative intellectuals to have dinner with him in San Francisco to discuss their latest books (he has also written a rather good book of his own, Zero to One).3 Mark Zuckerberg hosts an online book club. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, toyed, as a young man, with becoming a public intellectual and still likes to reminisce about his time studying philosophy at Oxford. Eric Schmidt, a former chairman of Google, is the author of a lengthening list of books and a fixture on the ideas-conference circuit.


pages: 741 words: 164,057

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

Pilkington observed: “Not everybody is able to fail twenty experiments and then get up and then come up with something brilliant.”3 At nineteen, Zhang placed third in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search competition, winning a $50,000 scholarship. His mother accompanied him through to the finals, exhorting her son, “Zhan zhi!” (“Stand up straight!”). He excelled at Harvard, matriculating the year before Mark Zuckerberg, earning a degree in chemistry (“the central science”) and physics. Zhang wanted a grounding in the fundamentals that he could apply as he saw fit. Eager to experience Silicon Valley, Zhang moved to Stanford for his PhD. His first choice supervisor, Nobel laureate Steven Chu, had moved on; camped out in Chu’s former office was a new faculty member, Karl Deisseroth.

Those appear to be a sure thing, but to whom and for what is a topic of much speculation. The two women have shared the “Nobel Prizes” of Japan, Spain, Israel, and Canada (with Zhang), to name a few. The most lucrative award was the Breakthrough Prize, created by Silicon Valley billionaires including Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sergey Brin (Google) and his ex-wife Anne Wojcicki (23andMe), and Dick Costolo (Twitter). At a black-tie awards ceremony in November 2014, Doudna and Charpentier received their awards from Hollywood actress Cameron Diaz. Charpentier flashed her Gallic humor on stage. “It’s kind of surreal to receive the prize from Cameron,” she said, then turned to Costolo: “Three powerful women… I was just wondering if you’re Charlie?”


pages: 229 words: 64,697

The Barefoot Investor: The Only Money Guide You'll Ever Need by Scott Pape

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Own Your Own Home, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Robert Shiller, Snapchat

My super does the same thing, but it's also got the 200 biggest Aussie companies — like the banks, Telstra and BHP. Pauline: Well, I just don't understand shares. You: Honestly, I don't know a balance sheet from a bedsheet, but I have faith that the world has amazing businesspeople like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos. With my super I automatically become a part-owner in their businesses, and they share their profits with me. Pauline: I don't like it. You: Well, I have my plan on autopilot so I don't have to think about it. It just ticks over until the day I retire (and beyond). It's been created with an accurate understanding of historical rates of return, and it's designed to outpace inflation and ensure I'll never run out of money.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

They’re becoming public utilities. The less we have a choice about whether to use them, the more we need democracy to step in. What if a new generation of antitrust laws, instead of breaking up the emerging online utilities, created a pathway to more democratic ownership? Rather than donating Facebook shares to his own LLC, Mark Zuckerberg could put them into a trust owned and controlled by Facebook users themselves. Then they, too, could have a seat in the boardroom when decisions are made about what to do with all that valuable personal data they pour into the platform—and they’d have a stake in ensuring the platform succeeds.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

That earnings premium stood at around 25 percent back in the late 1970s and has risen to roughly 50 percent more recently. This premium reflects the combined effects of supply-constricting and demand-inflating government policies.47 While the average American may think of Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg when they envision the top 1 percent, it is actually the surgeon who replaced their hip, the dentist who performed their last root canal, or the lawyer who handled their divorce who are the more typical representatives of that elite demographic. What they all have in common is that their incomes are substantially inflated by occupational licensing.


pages: 237 words: 64,411

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Charles Abrams, The City Is the Frontier (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). 11. https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/owner.html, last modified October 31, 2011. 12. http://www.epa.gov/airtrends/images/comparison70.jpg, accessed November 29, 2014. 13. “History of Long Term Care,” Elderweb, accessed November 27, 2014, http://www.elderweb.com/book/history-long-term-care. 14. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html, accessed November 27, 2014. 15. As an experienced entrepreneur, I can assure you this argument is completely ridiculous. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, would have worked just as hard for a tiny fraction of the rewards he reaped. The founders of Fairchild Semiconductor widely regarded as the seminal Silicon Valley startup—were thrilled to strike it rich when the parent company bought them out for the princely sum of $250,000 each.


pages: 267 words: 71,123

End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Upton Sinclair, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, working poor, Works Progress Administration

But what’s the marginal product of a corporate executive, or a hedge fund manager, or for that matter of a corporate lawyer? Nobody really knows. And if you look at how incomes for people in this class are actually determined, you find processes that arguably bear very little relationship to their economic contribution. At this point someone is likely to say, “But what about Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg? Didn’t they get rich by creating products of value?” And the answer is yes—but very few of the top 1 percent, or even the top 0.01 percent, made their money that way. For the most part, we’re looking at executives at firms that they didn’t themselves create. They may own a lot of stock or stock options in their companies, but they received those assets as part of their pay package, not by founding the business.


pages: 246 words: 68,392

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Most had little or no experience in the industries that they now set out to disrupt. Among the horde of tech entrepreneurs who launched service-sector startups in the wake of Uber’s funding announcement, Dan Teran and Saman Rahmanian made an unlikely pair. Not only did they both depart sharply from the Mark Zuckerberg brand of young, nerdy founder, but they did so in nearly opposite directions. Dan, with floppy blond hair, blue eyes, and the tall athletic build of a former college rugby player, could have looked like a preppy frat boy if he’d wanted. Instead, he went too long without a haircut, smoked openly, and developed a dry, sometimes biting, sense of humor.


pages: 276 words: 64,903

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win by Chris Kuenne, John Danner

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset light, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, business climate, business logic, call centre, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, pattern recognition, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sugar pill, super pumped, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, work culture , zero-sum game

Its fusion of beautiful design simplicity, functional technology, and innovative business models continues to reflect the transformative power a Driver can have—even when he or she sees way beyond everyone else’s headlights. Facebook’s Explorer In building Facebook into the global phenomenon it is today, Mark Zuckerberg revealed his Builder Type’s defining curiosity, systems thinking, and fascination with an interesting challenge: how can I attract, engage with, profile, and then connect with my friends or people I’d like to date? Zuck, as his friends know him, epitomizes the Explorer personality. Although Facebook’s headquarters are just up the road from Apple’s, you’d think you were in a different world altogether if you roamed the halls of Facebook and talked with its employees.


pages: 254 words: 69,276

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social by Steffen Mau

Airbnb, cognitive bias, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, connected car, crowdsourcing, digital capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, future of work, gamification, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, mittelstand, moral hazard, personalized medicine, positional goods, principal–agent problem, profit motive, QR code, reserve currency, school choice, selection bias, sharing economy, smart cities, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Uber for X, vertical integration, web of trust, Wolfgang Streeck

The days are long gone when you could gauge a person's socio-economic status accurately from their clothing and adjust your expectations accordingly. Nowadays, the cultural encoding of distinction often takes subtler forms – in fact, a person's status is often belied by their outer appearance and we see government ministers riding to work on rickety bicycles, streetwear becoming part of Wall Street culture, and the likes of Mark Zuckerberg turning up to the flotation of Facebook on the stock market in a hoodie. Today, we are no longer dealing solely with material inequalities and the associated practices of cultural distinction, but also with numerical inequalities. Numbers describe, create and reproduce status and, as such, they contribute to the institutionalization of certain orders of worth.


pages: 270 words: 64,235

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code by Jeff Atwood

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, endowment effect, fail fast, Firefox, fizzbuzz, Ford Model T, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Chrome, gravity well, Hacker News, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Merlin Mann, Minecraft, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, price anchoring, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, science of happiness, Skype, social software, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

So when you do spend money, keep these eight lessons in mind to maximize whatever happiness it can buy for you. And remember: it’s science! Lived Fast, Died Young, Left a Tired Corpse It’s easy to forget just how crazy things got during the Web 1.0 bubble in 2000. That was over ten years ago. For context, Mark Zuckerberg was all of sixteen when the original web bubble popped. There are two films which captured the hyperbole and excess of the original dot com bubble especially well. The first is the documentary Startup.com. It’s about the prototypical web 1.0 company: one predicated on an idea that made absolutely no sense, which proceeded to flame out in a spectacular and all too typical way for the era.


Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the Opportunities by Thomas H. Davenport

Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, cloud computing, commoditize, data acquisition, data science, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, recommendation engine, RFID, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sorting algorithm, statistical model, Tesla Model S, text mining, Thomas Davenport, three-martini lunch

Some of the smaller start-up firms don’t even have in-house IT functions; they outsource business IT. Some of the big data lessons from start-up and online firms are derived from and are similar to other general IT and entrepreneurship lessons from Silicon Valley firms. They include the injunction, popularized by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, to “move fast and break things,” and not worry too much about making mistakes. Another is to have bold and audacious goals that involve objectives other than simply making a lot of money. Facebook hopes to “make the world more open and connected.” Google’s well-publicized mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Here are the tales of Microsoft stock bought at twenty dollars and sold at two thousand, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard working in their rented Palo Alto garage, Ross Perot quitting IBM to found Computer Data Systems in Texas, Jeff Bezos opening an online bookstore, naming it after the largest river in the world, and then getting on the cover of Time magazine as the CEO of Amazon.com, and Mark Zuckerberg transforming the Harvard University first-year-student listing service into Facebook, the dominant and most valuable social media site in the world. These are the stories that have sustained the bulk of people’s interests in the history of computing. This is the history of computing as plutography, stories about money.


Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

They have a monopolistic tendency that emerges not through any sort of artificial means, whether collusion or mergers. Instead, the very nature of a platform business tends towards monopolisation. This is for a few different reasons. One is network effects: the more people who use a platform, the more valuable that platform becomes for everybody else. Again, Facebook is a good example. You may despise Mark Zuckerberg, hate the surveillance practices of Facebook and dislike the way they have handled fake news, but if you are going to join a social media network it will be Facebook, simply because that is where all your friends and family already are. That is the power of network effects, and once they reach a crucial tipping point, they grow and grow and grow.


pages: 234 words: 67,917

The Wondering Jew: Israel and the Search for Jewish Identity by Micah Goodman

augmented reality, battle of ideas, cognitive dissonance, European colonialism, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mount Scopus

They launched an initiative called Unplug Yourself, in which they call on people to abstain from technology one day a week.7 They do not demand a complete disconnection from technology: they travel on the Sabbath and use electricity. Their disconnection is from all contact with the virtual world. No email, no internet, no social media. The initiative has enjoyed notable success, with increasing numbers of young Americans joining it. Randi Zuckerberg, sister of the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, argues that people need a weekly detox to cleanse their minds from the toxins of technology.8 Reboot is not a rabbinical initiative. Those who answer the call to abstain from digital technology one day a week are not adherents—they are participants. So the question of how halakhic secularism can become a reality remains.


pages: 206 words: 68,757

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

airport security, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital nomad, Douglas Hofstadter, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Floyd, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, Inbox Zero, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kanban, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Parkinson's law, profit motive, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

“Attention is the beginning of devotion”: Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays (New York: Penguin, 2016), loc. 166 of 1669, Kindle. the former Facebook investor turned detractor Roger McNamee: Quoted in “Full Q&A: Zucked Author Roger McNamee on Recode Decode,” Vox, February 11, 2019, available at www.vox.com/podcasts/2019/2/11/18220779/zucked-book-roger-mcnamee-decode-kara-swisher-podcast-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-fb-sheryl-sandberg. In the words of the philosopher: Quoted in James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), xii. “distracted from distraction by distraction”: T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in Four Quartets (Boston: Mariner, 1968), 5.


pages: 238 words: 67,971

The Minimalist Home: A Room-By-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life by Joshua Becker

Albert Einstein, car-free, collaborative consumption, do what you love, endowment effect, estate planning, Lao Tzu, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, new economy, Paradox of Choice, side hustle, Steve Jobs

As Henry David Thoreau said long ago, “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”2 In most cases, it is classic fashion, not the trending pieces and colors, that stands the test of time. In his later years, Albert Einstein usually wore the same suit. Steve Jobs favored a black turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers. Mark Zuckerberg likes to wear a gray T-shirt. Their reputations certainly didn’t take a hit because they simplified their wardrobe decisions. Well, those are all men. Could it be different for women? Evidently not. Alice Gregory is doing fine with her iconic wardrobe. Similarly, Matilda Kahl, an art director for a leading New York ad agency, wears the same style of clothing to work every day and says it simplifies her morning routine while leveling the playing field with her male colleagues.3 My good friend Courtney Carver minimized her wardrobe down to a capsule set with only thirty-three items.


Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire: Everything I Know Now About Autism and Asperger's That I Wish I'd Known Then by David William Plummer

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, coronavirus, epigenetics, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, neurotypical, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), side project, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, wikimedia commons

Perhaps if a neurotypical person reading this is able to understand the characteristics, routines, and habits of high-functioning individuals with autism, they too will be able to increase their odds of success through learning new approaches for their own lives. There is no easy way to know if public figures such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are on the autism spectrum. If they are, none have publicly shared that information, and unless and until they do, it’s a private health matter that I won’t speculate on. We can, however, observe and identify certain traits and characteristics that they exhibit in common with people on the spectrum and note how they may have served to make those individuals so driven to success in their endeavors, regardless of whether they experience the disorder.


pages: 661 words: 185,701

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The project is in many ways reminiscent of internet.org, a Facebook-led initiative launched in 2013 with the goal of “bringing internet access and the benefits of connectivity to the portion of the world that doesn’t have them.” The service was intended to provide free access, through the Facebook mobile app, to websites handpicked by the company. The initiative was heavily criticized for violating net neutrality principles and for “digital colonialism.” Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was unapologetic, asserting that some access to the internet was better than nothing. He noted that libraries “don’t contain every book, but they still provide a world of good” and that “public hospitals don’t offer every treatment, but they still save lives.” In 2015, the project was rebranded as Free Basics and opened up to developers and other apps.

The digital colonialism phrase is taken from Olivia Solon, “ ‘It’s Digital Colonialism’: How Facebook’s Free Internet Service Has Failed Its Users,” Guardian, July 27, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/facebook-free-basics-developing-markets. The announcement of the rebranding of internet.org as Free Basics is available here: Mark Zuckerberg, “Free Basics,” Facebook post, September 25, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102388939996891. Zuckerberg’s quotes are taken from his article in the Times of India: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/free-basics-protects-net-neutrality/. In early 2016, in the face of strong government pushback, the Free Basics platform was withdrawn from India.


pages: 302 words: 73,581

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

.” – Sean Parker, on Facebook’s micro-market strategy The odds were stacked against Facebook when it launched. Friendster was already a big social network and Myspace was growing fast. Of all platform businesses, social networks are probably the most unforgiving of late market entrants. Why would someone, who was already on Myspace or Friendster, get onto Facebook? In hindsight, Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to launch Facebook in closed campus clusters, whether borne of calculation or convenience, was a master stroke. It helped achieve early network effects for what would ultimately become the Internet’s largest network. SOLVE A PAIN POINT FOR A NICHE SEGMENT Facebook focused on serving ‘underserved’ university students, to start with.


pages: 230 words: 76,655

Choose Yourself! by James Altucher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, cashless society, cognitive bias, dark matter, digital rights, do what you love, Elon Musk, estate planning, John Bogle, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, PageRank, passive income, pattern recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, superconnector, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, Y2K, Zipcar

The top right of the matrix (figure 2) is when you are an Idea Machine: you are working nonstop on your own excellent ideas that help the lives of others. You mind dips into dreams, and you make them reality or art or abundance. Founder of PayPal and first investor in Facebook Peter Thiel underlined this for me when he told me the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg turning down Yahoo’s offer of $1 billion to buy his company in July of 2006. Zuckerberg would’ve made $250 million that summer. Thiel, who was advising Zuckerberg at the time, wanted him to take it, or at least consider accepting the offer. Zuckerberg decided in ten minutes: No. As Peter put it, ideas were more valuable to Mark than money.


pages: 243 words: 74,452

Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck by Jon Acuff

Albert Einstein, fear of failure, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Ruby on Rails, Skype, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh

Blogs were in their baby stages and couldn’t easily be updated. Imagine if I had sat at my kitchen table and thought to myself, “I need to figure out my dream.” Is it possible that I would have been able to conceive the invention of Twitter? Might I have daydreamed up Facebook? What then? Would I just wait for Mark Zuckerberg to invent it? Me and my Moleskine notebook, writing: “I hope there’s a talented developer and two gigantic twins who are fighting over an idea right now that will one day be where I hustle.” That’s ridiculous. The same goes with picking a college major. When I was in college, almost nothing I’m doing now was a reality.


pages: 266 words: 80,018

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding

affirmative action, air gap, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, disinformation, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Firefox, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job-hopping, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, undersea cable, web application, WikiLeaks

A few days before their appearance at the review panel, Silicon Valley CEOs had gathered at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in San Francisco. The mood was mutinous. Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer said her company had to obey FISA court orders, even though it didn’t like them: ‘When you lose and don’t comply, it’s treason.’ Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg put it succinctly. The ‘government blew it,’ he said. During meetings with the review panel, however, the tech companies didn’t say anything about restricting NSA surveillance. Instead, some attendees suggest, the companies’ chief aim was to tell the customers a good story about how they were all protecting their data.


pages: 231 words: 73,818

The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life by Bernard Roth

Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, classic study, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, deskilling, do what you love, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, school choice, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, zero-sum game

Many students develop the idea that they’re supposed to follow a prescribed path, in which they’re not allowed to achieve anything until after they get a diploma. And if they don’t develop the habit of doing things of their own volition, they will not change after they graduate. Many of the greatest entrepreneurs already had their businesses going during college—and many never graduated. Today’s clearest example is Mark Zuckerberg and four fellow students, who started Facebook from the dorms at Harvard University. Based on this thought, I decided the class project directive would be: Do something you have really wanted to do and have never done, or solve a problem in your life. The projects served to introduce the achievement habit.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

After all, even some of those wealthy people themselves (like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet) have confessed to feeling under-taxed. But experience shows that this can be a losing game. Very wealthy people do sometimes decide to dedicate much of their wealth to charitable causes. Bill Gates (again) and Mark Zuckerberg are obvious examples, and even some of the robber barons of the late 19th century gave fabulous sums to charitable foundations. One of the most successful of those barons was the Scottish-American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who endowed some 3,000 municipal libraries, and provided funding for several universities and numerous other organisations before he died.


pages: 268 words: 74,724

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

That his stake would eventually be measured in the billions is all the evidence we need to prove that he risked losing his entire investment. If investors had viewed Facebook as a sure thing back in 2004, Thiel’s $500,000 would have bought him a much smaller portion of the company’s shares. In such a scenario, founder Mark Zuckerberg could have declined to accept Thiel’s money in the first place. Importantly, Thiel is willing to lose on investments. As he explained in his 2014 book Zero to One, “Most venture-backed companies don’t IPO or get acquired; most fail, usually soon after they start.”6 Venture capital firms allocate credit to a variety of different entrepreneurial concepts well aware that most will wind up defunct.


pages: 202 words: 72,857

The Wealth Dragon Way: The Why, the When and the How to Become Infinitely Wealthy by John Lee

8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, butterfly effect, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Donald Trump, financial independence, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, intangible asset, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Maslow's hierarchy, multilevel marketing, negative equity, passive income, payday loans, reality distortion field, self-driving car, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, Tony Hsieh, Y2K

Bill Gates has ploughed billions of his own money into a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of people facing poverty and disease; people who, without the efforts of the foundation, would struggle to survive. What motivated Steve Jobs was not money; it was a passion for computers, and his belief that they could change and improve the world we live in. Jobs believed computers and humans could have a more symbiotic relationship, and he worked tirelessly towards that goal. Mark Zuckerberg was driven by the idea of people connecting through cyberspace. His commitment to keep expanding and developing Facebook may have earned him huge sums of money, but people who know him report that Zuckerberg has always lived a quite simple and modest life. In your universe: Rich people are mean and corrupt.


pages: 256 words: 75,139

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

The title of Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book The World is Flat was based on the belief that globalization would inevitably bring us closer together. It has done that, but it has also inspired us to build barriers. When faced with perceived threats – the financial crisis, terrorism, violent conflict, refugees and immigration, the increasing gap between rich and poor – people cling more tightly to their groups. The co-founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, believed social media would unite us. In some respects it has, but it has simultaneously given voice and organizational ability to new cyber tribes, some of whom spend their time spewing invective and division across the World Wide Web. There seem now to be as many tribes, and as much conflict between them, as there has ever been.


pages: 229 words: 72,431

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day by Craig Lambert

airline deregulation, Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, big-box store, business cycle, carbon footprint, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Galaxy Zoo, ghettoisation, gig economy, global village, helicopter parent, IKEA effect, industrial robot, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, recommendation engine, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, you are the product, zero-sum game, Zipcar

As the Internet-era proverb warns: If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. When Facebook went public in 2012 (the company had valued itself at $104 billion, though the public offering sold only $16 billion worth of stock), some of its users publicly asked, “Where’s our cut?” They recognized that shadow work by the site’s users had created the value that founder Mark Zuckerberg and his business partners sold to investors. Unfortunately for those users, they have no claim on the revenue FB generates from their input. Nor are they well organized enough to apply political pressure. Furthermore, users obviously reap the benefits of Facebook without paying a monthly fee.


pages: 204 words: 73,747

This Is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare by Gabourey Sidibe

call centre, Mark Zuckerberg, Snapchat, telemarketer

I’ve seen it on both my Instagram and my Twitter, but Facebook is where it got started. Facebook! You know, that social-media site you use to spy on your ex and figure out at election time which of your family members are racist. Everything anyone has ever written on Facebook has to be 100 percent true. If not, Mark Zuckerberg has to punch a sloth in the face. He doesn’t want to, but those are the rules. (You can tell this is sarcasm, right?) At first, the Gabby-is-dead article was from a surely reputable online news site called Can’t Stop Hip-Hop Worldwide (I’m pretty sure I heard that Diane Sawyer once interned there).


pages: 352 words: 80,030

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In Russia, for example, Facebook was told that if the personal data of those who used the business were not stored on Russian servers, access to the site would be blocked.69 Not only that, but it recently emerged that Facebook had also been allowing Russia’s largest technology corporation, Mail.Ru Group, to have access to personal user data. ‘We have a responsibility to protect your data,’ wrote Mark Zuckerberg in a Facebook post – while not admitting that his company had been sharing it with a company with deep and close links with the Kremlin, a fact that emerged only later.70 Russia’s way of monitoring the digital activities of its own citizens and, presumably, those of others too, lay behind the blocking of the encrypted Telegram messaging service, as well as virtual private networks (VPNs) that enable the bypassing or concealment of localisation services.71 In Turkey, meanwhile, regular state interference with social media sites is coupled with government actions that purport to prevent ‘abnormal’ messages on the day of presidential elections.72 Then there is China, where the three largest telecoms companies – China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom – are state-owned, where the government has taken steps to block VPNs as part of an internet ‘clean-up’, and where access to sites like Google, Facebook and Twitter is blocked.73 In one part of the world, monitoring what citizens routinely do online is used to drive corporate revenues; in another it is considered a matter of national security


pages: 361 words: 76,849

The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work by Scott Berkun

barriers to entry, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Broken windows theory, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, future of work, Google Hangouts, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Kanban, Lean Startup, lolcat, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, post-work, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Stallman, Seaside, Florida, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Hsieh, trade route, work culture , zero-sum game

They'd invested heavily in tools and systems but put the onus on employees, even new ones like me, to decide how, when, and where to do their work. These attributes of culture didn't arrive by some technique sprinkled around the company years after it started. How did it happen, then? In 2002, eight years before I was hired and two years before Mark Zuckerberg would start Facebook, eighteen-year-old Matt Mullenweg, a recent graduate of Houston's High School for the Performing Arts, went to Washington, DC. An avid photographer, he wanted to add the pictures from his trip to his popular photo website, photomatt.net. He'd been using a program called Cafelog, but he was increasingly frustrated by it.


pages: 226 words: 71,540

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web by Cole Stryker

4chan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, eternal september, Firefox, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, informal economy, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, pre–internet, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social bookmarking, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, TED Talk, wage slave, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

It made its founder billions of dollars, brought generations of people online and furthermore made them active. Facebook has redefined how humans communicate. Speaking purely in terms of scale, 4chan is a tiny playground for bored geeks in comparison. In David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously declared: The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly . . . Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. Facebook has struggled over the last few years to define its stance on privacy as it relates to the site’s sometimes shockingly targeted advertising platform.


pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

For most of history since then, entrepreneurship has meant either setting up a corner grocery shop or some other sort of modest local business or, more rarely, a total pie-in-the-sky crapshoot around an idea that is more likely to bring ruination than riches. Today we are spoiled by the easy pickings of the Web. Any kid with an idea and a laptop can create the seeds of a world-changing company—just look at Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook or any one of thousands of other Web startups hoping to follow his path. Sure, they may fail, but the cost is measured in overdue credit-card payments, not lifelong disgrace and a pauper’s prison. The beauty of the Web is that it democratized the tools both of invention and of production.


pages: 280 words: 79,029

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

With a traditional loan, the asymmetry still exists, but the obligation to repay at least offers greater protection to the interests of the investor. Information asymmetry goes hand in hand with a problem known as “adverse selection.” Imagine that the year is 2003, and an investor decides to put her money into a promising young Harvard undergraduate named Mark Zuckerberg. As the years roll on, it becomes clear that the investor has made a spectacularly good decision: Zuckerberg’s social-networking site, Facebook, is steaming toward a public listing, and a small share of his annual income is still a big amount of money. But what if Zuckerberg decides to pay himself a nominal salary during these early years in order to avoid handing over dollops of cash unnecessarily?


pages: 303 words: 75,192

10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less by Garett Jones

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Brexit referendum, business cycle, central bank independence, clean water, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, fake news, financial independence, game design, German hyperinflation, hive mind, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Neil Armstrong, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen

That $140,000 difference wasn’t mostly because the judges were tougher on the median losing defendant, the typical person who had to pay out; it’s mostly because elected judges were more likely to hand out huge awards to a minority of the cases. This difference between the average (the mean) and median (the typical outcome) is worth thinking about. If you look at average (mean) awards, then a single million-dollar payout counts for more in the statistics than dozens of thousand-dollar payouts. As the cliché goes, if Mark Zuckerberg walks into my classroom, then the average person in my classroom is a billionaire—but the median person is still a thousandaire. That mean-median distinction could have been shaping the Helland-Tabarrok results, so they wisely checked to see if that was the case, and as so often when you look under the hood of a statistical analysis, that’s when the results got really interesting.


pages: 269 words: 79,285

Silk Road by Eileen Ormsby

4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, disinformation, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, fiat currency, Firefox, incognito mode, Julian Assange, litecoin, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, off-the-grid, operational security, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, power law, profit motive, Right to Buy, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, stealth mode startup, Ted Nelson, trade route, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

A new buyer can get instant access to 1200+ vendors, while a new vendor can get instant access to tens of thousands of buyers. Another aspect of it is the psychology of brand loyalty. SR has proven to be a trusted platform. People like and trust DPR (they don’t merely put up [with] him like Mark Zuckerberg, for example). People are rightfully suspicious of others in the drug world, because there are a lot of scammers and assholes, but SR works for the vast majority of people. It has proven itself. People stick with what works, rather than take risks with new products (or markets) even if they are theoretically a better alternative.


The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum by Temple Grandin, Richard Panek

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, David Brooks, deliberate practice, double helix, ghettoisation, Gregor Mendel, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, Khan Academy, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies

We have a lot farther to go, of course. Ignorance and misunderstanding are always difficult to overcome when they’ve become part of a society’s belief system. For instance, when the movie The Social Network came out, in 2010, the New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks wrote this assessment of the onscreen character of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook: “It’s not that he’s a bad person. He’s just never been house-trained.” The “training” of the fictional character, however, would have had to somehow accommodate a brain that can’t process facial and gestural cues that most people easily assimilate and that finds its greatest fulfillment not in the fizzy buzz of forming a personal relationship but in the click-clack logic of writing code.


pages: 290 words: 76,216

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

They have found impressive evidence of ‘irrational’ choices – for example, investors’ preference for high-cost actively managed funds which underperform zero-cost index funds. Behavioural economists identify the following ‘systemic’ errors that people make. 1. Survivorship bias We tend to look only at what was successful. Think of a newspaper article that claims it can help you imitate Mark Zuckerberg’s morning routine. The obvious implication is that you too could become a billionaire if you just wore grey t-shirts and ate the right breakfast, but this ignores the multitudes of non-billionaires doing just that. 2. Loss aversion It is fairly well established that people hate losing something more than they love gaining it.


Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game by Walker Deibel

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, deal flow, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, diversification, drop ship, Elon Musk, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, high net worth, intangible asset, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, Peter Thiel, risk tolerance, risk/return, rolodex, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, Y Combinator

By combining an investment in the existing revenue, infrastructure, and earnings with the drive and innovation fueling the entrepreneur, acquisition provides a powerful recipe, allowing existing companies to go to new heights, having tremendous impact, and providing a platform for the entrepreneur’s art. 10 ACQUISITION ENTREPRENEURSHIP VERSES VENTURE CAPITAL Acquisition entrepreneurship is not right for every circumstance or everyone. After all, certain entrepreneurs have enjoyed such remarkable success that they have obtained celebrity, even legendary status. We’re all familiar with the titans of technology who dominate the business media: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, to name a few. These 9 guys didn’t start by buying a company, so why should you? Lately, it’s been the startups able to get to the billion-dollar valuation, the “unicorn” companies, in the limelight. These companies are changing how we live and work, and they are not only creating tremendous value but are introducing new business models.


pages: 555 words: 80,635

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game

It is tempting to label these profits as the just desserts of ingenuity and innovation, or the economic “carrot” that offers incentives for risk-taking. To be sure, the creators of Apple Computer, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have changed the way we use computers and the Internet, benefiting billions of people. Yet for every Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, there are tens of thousands of technology talents that have contributed to this industry, and despite very similar levels of ingenuity and hard work, have not become even a thousandth as rich. Alongside entrepreneurial profits, there is substantial evidence of increased market power for many large corporations.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

It was widely reported, for example, that the Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud was deeply upset by Forbes’ ranking of his wealth in the 2013 billionaires list.7 He believed he should have been listed among the ten richest people in the world but Forbes disagreed.8 A quick glance at that list for 2016 shows the following: Figure 44: The ten richest people in the world in 2016 Rank Name Net Worth ($ billions) Increase needed to move up one place #1 Bill Gates 75 #2 Amancio Ortega 67 12% #3 Warren Buffett 60.8 10% #4 Carlos Slim Helú 50 22% #5 Jeff Bezos 45.2 11% #6 Mark Zuckerberg 44.6 1% #7 Larry Ellison 43.6 2% #8 Michael Bloomberg 40 9% #9= Charles Koch 39.6 1% #9= David Koch 39.6 1% Source: Forbes9 The average increase in wealth required to move up just one place is 8 per cent – a considerable undertaking against a moving target. Larry Ellison, for example, is extraordinarily wealthy but Bill Gates has almost twice as much wealth.


pages: 258 words: 79,503

The Genius Within: Unlocking Your Brain's Potential by David Adam

Albert Einstein, business intelligence, cognitive bias, CRISPR, Flynn Effect, Gregor Mendel, job automation, John Conway, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, SimCity, Skype, Stephen Hawking, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray

They might not sell sperm any more, but scientists still select and work with intelligent people. The biggest list of the brightest is held by scientists at the Centre for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who every year screen school test results to identify gifted teenagers and encourage their development. Stars including Face-book’s Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin of Google and Lady Gaga have enrolled in the scheme and attended its summer schools – affectionately known as geek camps – and as a result the scientists now have records of some 1.5 million intelligent people. The brightest of these students – who score the best marks before they are thirteen years old – are invited to join an elite project, which tracks their progress to work out what makes them so special.


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

‘A site where you could name the price you were willing to pay for any task. There had to be someone in my neighbor- hood who was willing to get that dog food for what I was willing to pay.’12 Most big technology businesses, you might say, have such stories: from Steve Jobs’ garage, in which Apple was born, to Mark Zuckerberg’s dropping out of Harvard to set up Facebook. That’s true—but things become more dif- ficult when we come to platforms’ tales about their operations and their place in society. Seen in that light, founding myths are often part of a broader narrative designed to shield on-demand businesses from regulatory cross- hairs by painting them as small players at the fringes of regulated business activity.


pages: 240 words: 78,436

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

While it is important to clearly set out generic policies and objectives, it is often useful to keep their detailed implementation hidden so that participants punished for bad behaviour cannot easily bypass the exact rule that was invoked. 168 Trust, governance and brand Sometimes the softer rules of platforms are conveyed through the behaviour of existing platform participants, community leaders or even through coaching examples chosen to explain the on-boarding process to new participants. A ‘like’ on a Facebook post from Mark Zuckerberg will do wonders to your online credentials and shows other platform participants that whatever you are doing is consistent with what Facebook expects from its users. The behavioural norms that emerge over time in many platforms help shape the future behaviour of new joiners and the platform ecosystem as it scales.


pages: 600 words: 72,502

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

That’s why Intel attempted to eliminate Advanced Micro Devices, for which it was fined by the European Union.9 That is why Facebook is using its deep pockets and huge user base to empower its Instagram subsidiary to “kneecap” its rival Snapchat by copying Snapchat’s core product.10 Managers feel more secure when their customers have no alternative to the product or service they produce. Given that American monopolists from Rockefeller to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg have become among the richest men in history, the appeal of establishing a monopoly is understandable. But it has a downside. Monopolies don’t last in the natural world, and they don’t last in business either. Monopolies don’t last in nature because they don’t adapt, and the fundamental rule of nature, as posited by Charles Darwin, is survival of the fittest—by which he meant those most able to adapt to the environment and its changes.


pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

The latest research from the Edelman communication firm finds that 86% of respondents across 27 countries expect CEOs to speak out on at least some societal issues.”13 On the other hand, Colvin noted, there were significant complications for businesses speaking out, such as the traditional reluctance of CEOs to weigh in on jury verdicts, and the probability that there would be an appeal. But the CEOs who did speak out placed the focus not on Chauvin but on the future of racial justice. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tweeted, “Right now I’m thinking of George Floyd, his family and those who knew him. I hope this verdict brings some measure of comfort to them, and to everyone who can’t help but see themselves in his story. We stand in solidarity with you, knowing that this is part of a bigger struggle against racism and injustice.”14 General Motors’ Mary Barra weighed in: “While the guilty verdicts in the trial seeking justice for George Floyd are a step in the fight against bias and injustice, we must remain determined to drive meaningful, deliberate change on a broad scale.”15 From Microsoft president Brad Smith: “Today’s verdict is a step forward in acknowledging painful truths and for the continued cause of defeating racism and fighting discrimination.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

However, when asked if other people would reduce work and labour, they tend to say others would. Other people are lazy, but not me! There is also a presumption on the part of critics that people on low incomes will reduce labour and work in response to a basic income, whereas they presume no such thing for richer people. After all, billionaires such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg still work, though they certainly do not need the income! Billionaires aside, a 1999 study of lottery winners showed that all had continued (or wished to continue) work of some kind. However, only a small minority were still in the jobs they had before. Instead, most were doing work, both paid and unpaid, that they enjoyed.


pages: 287 words: 82,576

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

When he started his first business, he was living out of a cement pipe. He later founded Amer International Group, which supplies cable and copper products, and he has been listed as China’s fourteenth wealthiest man. American rags-to-riches stories are much harder to find these days. You can certainly find riches—look at someone like Mark Zuckerberg. But he hardly grew up in rags. Simply put, these days not many, if any, Americans are starting out their lives in the kind of poverty that Jack Ma experienced as a kid. That sounds good, and indeed it is good, but it also means that wealthy, comfortable societies have less dynamism and churn, and that is going to mean much more complacency.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

Several members of the very rich, notably Bill Gates, the Walton family, Michael Dell, and Eli Broad, supported public education through philanthropy. They had grown rich by finding new ways to provide other services, and they thought that the key to improving public education could be found similarly. Cory Booker, then Mayor of Newark, agreed with this approach and convinced another billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2010 to provide $100 million dollars a year for five years to Newark schools to emulate the spectacular successes of Microsoft, Walmart, and Facebook.19 Booker used the outside funds to hire a private firm of educational consultants who eventually earned close to $300 million advising Newark.


pages: 278 words: 83,468

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

3D printing, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, continuous integration, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hockey-stick growth, Kanban, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, payday loans, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, pull request, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, scientific management, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, social bookmarking, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

It was not the market-leading social network or even the first college social network; other companies had launched sooner and with more features. With 150,000 registered users, it made very little revenue, yet that summer they raised their first $500,000 in venture capital. Less than a year later, they raised an additional $12.7 million. Of course, by now you’ve guessed that these three college sophomores were Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes of Facebook. Their story is now world famous. Many things about it are remarkable, but I’d like to focus on only one: how Facebook was able to raise so much money when its actual usage was so small.1 By all accounts, what impressed investors the most were two facts about Facebook’s early growth.


pages: 255 words: 76,495

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff by Clara Shih

Benchmark Capital, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, glass ceiling, jimmy wales, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, pets.com, pre–internet, rolodex, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social web, software as a service, tacit knowledge, Tony Hsieh, web application

Thousands of people filed complaints with the company. A Facebook group was formed called “Students Against Facebook News Feed,” which grew to hundreds of thousands of members overnight. Students across the country banded together to boycott the site. But Facebook recovered, and then some. An apology on the Facebook Blog from CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg together with user privacy controls and a promise to conduct market testing next time placated the concerns. Feeds are now one of the top reasons why members keep returning to Facebook. The continual sense of recency about the information has transformed Facebook from novel thrill to repeat destination.


pages: 302 words: 86,614

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds by Maneet Ahuja, Myron Scholes, Mohamed El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, high-speed rail, impact investing, interest rate derivative, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, NetJets, oil shock, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systematic bias, systematic trading, tail risk, two and twenty, zero-sum game

Some of the Foundation’s significant investments in the nonprofit world have included the One Acre Fund, which is transforming the lives of tens of thousands of subsistence farmers in East Africa through training and access to better seeds, technology, fertilizer, and farming techniques; the Foundation for Newark’s Future, which, with Ackman’s long-time friend Mayor Cory Booker, and in partnership with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is changing the educational opportunities for Newark’s 45,000 children and their families; and the Innocence Project, which uses DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongly convicted. Before funding any charity, Ackman does his homework, as he would for the Fund’s investments, and he typically backs those ventures that promise the greatest leverage for his charitable dollars.


pages: 302 words: 80,287

When the Wolves Bite: Two Billionaires, One Company, and an Epic Wall Street Battle by Scott Wapner

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, deal flow, independent contractor, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, multilevel marketing, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, price discrimination, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Tim Cook: Apple, unbiased observer

.… Consider inviting Ackman to Herbalife to learn more about the business, the products, the people.” The report even suggested that “Ackman would be drawn to a meeting that gave him a photo op and bragging rights for associating with someone he considers a bigger celebrity with the right image, perhaps President Obama, Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Bruckheimer, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, or the current or most recent Presidents and Past Presidents of Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.” The document also recommended Herbalife “see Ackman’s highly public campaign for what it is: an opportunity to tell the world about (the company).” “Create a big, positive narrative around (CEO) Michael Johnson,” it recommended.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

The digital revolution—the transistor, the silicone chip, the personal computer, the Internet, online shopping, the Cloud—has largely been driven by inventors and entrepreneurs based in Silicon Valley, Seattle, or at elite universities such as Harvard. And if you read their biographies—from Jack Kilby, Robert Noyce, and others who developed the integrated circuit and the silicon chip to Microsoft’s Bill Gates or Apple’s Steve Jobs, from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and on—they have one thing in common. When they came up with whatever breakthrough they were responsible for, they were young. Japan doesn’t have many young people anymore. It’s hard to innovate when your society is old. The examples of Japan and Korea repeat themselves through the Asian Pacific in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.


pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

But without the promise of mass employment to go along with all that disruption, they summon more concern that robots are coming to steal our jobs than awe. We all can’t just go to an “innovation clinic” and launch our own app. This hasn’t stopped the new captains of industry from trying to expand their appeal into the political realm. Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders and philanthropists aim to disrupt the public sector with their advocacy and donations, while keeping it underfunded by shielding their fortunes from taxation. Many moonlight as self-help gurus imploring people to “do what they love,” even as millions struggle to get by in a nightmarish “task rabbit” economy.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

Multinationals, especially the big tech companies, may turn out to be the target of the globotics backlash if it does go global and does go to the street. Who Might the Backlash Target? Big tech companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google were just starting to get roughed up in the “playground” of public opinion when this book went to press. In early 2018, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook was called to testify before the US Congress and EU Parliament about a scandal involving the misuse of users’ data. These guys make perfect targets for populist backlashers. They are fabulously rich for one. Zuckerberg’s estimated weatlth is over $70 billion; for comparison, the US Marine Corps’ annual budget is only $27 billion.


pages: 315 words: 81,433

A Life Less Throwaway: The Lost Art of Buying for Life by Tara Button

behavioural economics, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, Downton Abbey, Fairphone, gamification, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, Internet of things, Kickstarter, life extension, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, meta-analysis, period drama, planned obsolescence, Rana Plaza, retail therapy, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, thinkpad

Not only has it saved her countless hours and dollars, it’s also freed up brain space for her to be creative and released her from the pressure and stress of dressing to impress every morning. It’s a strategy employed by some of the world’s greatest thinkers to allow them to focus on what’s important. Steve Jobs famously bought 100 Issey Miyake black turtlenecks, enough to last him a lifetime, and Mark Zuckerberg’s grey T-shirt and hoodie combo has become iconic. But there’s no need for a work uniform to be boring. The head of Pixar wears a raucously loud Hawaiian shirt every day. How do you choose a work uniform? There are several factors to take into consideration, including: •The most formal and casual occasions that you will come across at work.


pages: 389 words: 81,596

Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required by Kristy Shen, Bryce Leung

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy low sell high, call centre, car-free, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, digital nomad, do what you love, Elon Musk, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk/return, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, the rule of 72, working poor, Y2K, Zipcar

Hustlers tend to gravitate toward entrepreneurial activities, correctly recognizing that trading time for money has a natural ceiling on how much you can earn. You only have so many hours a day, so tying your earnings to time limits your potential. If you become an entrepreneur, on the other hand, there is no upper limit on your earnings, so these people tend to work for themselves. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg are examples of successful Hustlers. Hustlers see the world as endlessly full of opportunities to make money, and if given the chance they will talk your ear off about their next venture (or ventures). They tend not to put much emphasis on controlling their spending, as they view money as an infinitely renewable resource.


pages: 310 words: 85,995

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

I learned much, some of which will be reflected in later notes, but I was relieved to find that Smith will not be turning in his grave at my account of his ideas. 4.Norman (2018). 5.Towers et al. (2016). 6.This was the disagreement between Hume and Kant. 7.Haidt (2012). 8.Mercier and Sperber (2017). 9.Gamble et al. (2018). 10.The Leninist concept of ‘democratic’ centralism. 11.As Haidt (2012) remarks, ‘Deontology and Utilitarianism are “one receptor” moralities, appealing to people with a lack of empathy.’ 12.See Dijksterhuis (2005), and Christakis and Fowler (2009). 13.See Hood (2014). 14.See Thomas et al. (2014). 15.See, for example, Cialdini (2007). 16.Akerlof and Shiller (2009), p. 54. 17.Mueller and Rauh (2017). 18.On taboos see Bénabou and Tirole (2011). 19.I have set these ideas out more fully in Collier (2016). 20.A good introduction is their book Identity Economics, Akerlof and Kranton (2011). 21.Besley (2016). 22.If you are interested in the details, I have recently surveyed this new literature: Collier (2017). 23.World Happiness Report, 2017. 24.The sentiments are those of John Perry Barlow and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively. 25.The technical term is homology. 26.As argued in the seminal study by MacIntyre in 1981, the essence of moral language is to treat others not just as means to a self-interested end, but rather as ends in themselves. See MacIntyre (2013). 27.I have explained shared identity, reciprocity and purposive actions as an analytic sequence, but the empirical evidence that the three components are jointly necessary for ethical collective behaviour comes from the work of Nobel Laureate Eleanor Ostrom (1990) and her successors. 28.For a fuller discussion of the underlying theory and evidence, see Collier (2018d). 29.A phenomenon known as the political business cycle; Chauvet and Collier (2009). 30.Putnam (2016), p. 221. 3.


pages: 313 words: 84,312

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Users created profile pages with a variety of personal information and used these to link to others in a format that would become standard. Friendster had 3.3 million users by October 2003 but was subsequently overtaken by MySpace, with 78 million members in 2007, and in South Korea by Cyworld with 15 million members. By late 2007, however, the fastest growing network was on Facebook, a site created by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg to link to people in different residential houses on campus. There are many more niche social networks, which may be the wave of the future, such as Gaia Online, an ecological network that claims 5 million members who have generated 850 million posts. Linked.In is business-focused: its 7.5 million members use it mainly for professional networking.


pages: 320 words: 86,372

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself by Peter Fleming

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon tax, clockwatching, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, David Graeber, death from overwork, Etonian, future of work, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, neoliberal agenda, Parkinson's law, post-industrial society, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, shareholder value, social intelligence, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, transaction costs, wealth creators, working poor

Take these real-life examples to get a flavour: a real-estate agent prepares for her Monday morning meeting during the kids’ football game at the weekend; a music store retail assistant is encouraged to wear his own clothes, because it evokes the kind of ‘cool’ that could never be prescribed by a dull middle manager; Mark Zuckerberg’s trademark hoodie heralds a new kind of corporate entrepreneur in which hard work, lifestyle, extramural interests and skill blur into a singular ethos; an IT start-up realizes that most of its workers train themselves in their own time (as a labour of love), and concentrates on tapping these innovative capabilities rather than composing them; a large hotel chain posts its ‘employee of the month’ in the lobby, detailing his favourite movies, holiday destination and hobbies; an airline attendant trainee is told to act as if the aeroplane cabin is her living room, so that feelings of warmth and goodwill are more easily evoked; businesses as diverse as call-centres and pharmaceutical conglomerates expressly hire ‘attitude’ and ‘personality’, knowing that enrolling the ‘whole person’ is vital for teamwork, problem solving and customer interaction; a high-tech employee finds himself dreaming up code solutions in his sleep, dubbing it ‘sleep work’; a rich investment banker laments to her half-forgotten husband, ‘My job is my life’.


pages: 285 words: 86,174

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Between 2000 and 2005 about 40 percent of Princeton students who chose full-time employment upon graduation went to Wall Street. Harvard featured similar numbers. And it’s not just Wall Street. The most notably successful tycoons of our own era, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, are all products of the most elite educational institutions in existence. Gates and Zuckerberg both ditched Harvard to pursue their business dreams, but their pre-Harvard educations took place at some of the most elite, expensive prep schools in the nation. Thanks in large part to the private equity revolution of the 1980s and 1990s, American business around the country has been remade in Wall Street’s image.


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

The technology simply offers no advantages to the established, to the institutional, to the victorious. Technology platforms are also not as monolithic in their approaches as I may have suggested so far. In an interview with Vanity Fair, the 4chan.org founder Christopher Poole contrasted his approach with Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg: Mark’s vision of the world is that you should be comfortable sharing as your real self on the Internet. … He thinks that anonymity represents a lack of authenticity, almost a cowardice. Though I like Mark a lot as a person, I disagree with that. … 4chan, a site that’s anonymous and ephemeral, with wacky, Wild West–type stuff, has a lot to offer, and in Mark’s perfect world, it probably wouldn’t exist … He is a very firm believer that his is the right way for society to go.16 Despite a marked difference in worldview, both Facebook and 4chan revolve around individuals and the notion that individuals should have total freedom in anonymity, versus the individual having integrity in identity.


pages: 304 words: 80,143

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

“Putnam: Making Democracy Work,” Wikisum, 1993, http://wikisum.com/w/Putnam:_Making_Democracy_Work (accessed June 28, 2019); and Melissa Hudson, “Making Democracies Work: A Comparison of Robert Putnam and Barry Weingast,” Stanford University Education, https://web.stanford.edu/class/polisci311/mahudson/hudson.week4.doc (accessed June 28, 2019). 35. Laura Hautala, “Can Facebook’s New Hires Take on Troll Farms and Data Privacy?,” CNET, April 11, 2018, https://www.cnet.com/news/can-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-new-hires-take-on-troll-farms-and-data-privacy-after-cambridge-analytica/ (accessed June 28, 2019). 36. Schenck vs. United States, U.S. Supreme Court, 1919. 37. Michael S. Malone, “Malone’s Laws of Technology,” ABC News, July 17, 2009, https://preview.abcnews.go.com/Business/Technology/story?


The Gene Machine by Venki Ramakrishnan

CRISPR, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, ghettoisation, Higgs boson, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

He decided to reward famous physicists in string theory who would never get a Nobel because the theory is, so far, not capable of being experimentally verified and is thus more akin to natural philosophy than science. In one stroke, he gave nine of them a prize of three million dollars each. Subsequently, he convinced fellow billionaires like Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg to join in, so there are now Breakthrough Prizes in the life sciences and mathematics. The first recipients seem to have been decided rather arbitrarily by Milner and his associates, probably after consultation with some famous scientists, so it was not surprising that they were generally well known or well connected.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

An analysis of smartphone data found that between March 1 and May 1 as many as 420,000 people moved out of New York City. Wealthy neighborhoods such as the Upper East Side, the West Village, and SoHo saw residential population declines of 40% or more. Remote work has made this option more feasible, but only for professionals. California cities are facing a similar exodus on the horizon: Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, remarked that, since the pandemic, three-quarters of his employees have signaled some level of interest in leaving the Bay Area. Reports from France suggested a similar trend, with Parisians decamping to rural regions they once scorned as “the provinces”—with many locals suspicious of these unwelcome, potentially infected visitors.


pages: 312 words: 84,421

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Although a multigenerational workforce is the way of the future, job seekers are reporting discrimination kicking in significantly earlier. A TV sitcom called Younger debuted in March 2015. It follows a newly single mom who revitalizes her career by passing herself off as a twenty-something. She’s forty. Her peers have been getting Botox and hair transplants in Silicon Valley, where in 2007 Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, famously told an audience at Stanford University that “young people are just smarter.” In a New Republic article titled “The Brutal Ageism of Tech,” San Francisco cosmetic surgeon Seth Matarasso, who says he’s the world’s second-biggest dispenser of Botox, described a patient base that had morphed from sagging spouses in late middle age to guys saying things like, “Hey, I’m forty years old and I have to get in front of a board of fresh-faced kids.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

Capital too is built on a self-replicating code, and like a virus it seeks to turn everything it touches into a self-replicating replica of itself – more capital. The system becomes a juggernaut, an unstoppable machine that’s programmed for endless expansion. * We often talk about the relentless expansionary drive of corporations like Amazon or Facebook as due to greed; CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg are just obsessed with accumulating money and power, we might say. But it’s not quite so simple. The reality is that these firms, and the CEOs who run them, are subject to a structural imperative for growth. The Zuckerbergs of the world are just willing cogs in a bigger machine. Here’s how it works.


pages: 280 words: 82,393

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes by Ian Leslie

Atul Gawande, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, data science, different worldview, double helix, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture , zero-sum game

., ‘Fractal Variability versus Pathologic Periodicity: Complexity Loss and Stereotypy in Disease’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 40 (4), 1997 Gottman, John, The Relationship Cure, Crown Publications, 2002 Gottman, John, Swanson, Catherine, and Swanson, Kristin, ‘A General Systems Theory of Marriage: Nonlinear Difference Equation Modeling of Marital Interaction’, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6 (4), 2002 Graham, Paul, How to Disagree, March 2008, http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html Greene, Joshua, Moral Tribes, Atlantic Books (UK), 2014 Grossman, Lev, ‘Mark Zuckerberg, Person of the Year 2010’, Time, 15 December 2010 Grubb, Amy Rose, ‘Modern-day hostage [crisis] negotiation: the evolution of an art form within the policing arena’, Aggression and Violent Behaviour, 15 (5), 2010 Haidt, J., et al., ‘The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives: Exaggeration of Differences across the Political Spectrum’, PLoS ONE, 7 (12), 2012, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0050092 Hall, Edward T., Beyond Culture, Anchor, 1976 Halperin, Basil, Ho, Benjamin, List, John A., Muir, Ian, ‘Towards an understanding of the economics of apologies: evidence from a large-scale natural field experiment’, NBER Working Paper No. 25676, March 2019 Hempel, Jessi, ‘Eli Pariser Predicted the Future.


Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

In various court filings before his death, he frequently used language and tactics ripped straight from the sovereign citizen movement, a bogus crusade that claims that people can skirt the legal system by declaring themselves “sovereign citizens,” immune from most laws. 150 OFF THE EDGE He told me, on multiple occasions and at great length, that he thought people’s names were actually government-owned copyrights, and that he could file lawsuits to seize those names, the very thing that had annoyed the San Bernardino authorities so much that they eventually pursued his arrest. “Basically, I have claimed legal entities for very famous people. They can’t even exist,” he told me. “Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Warren Edward Buffett. I own the legal entities they’re operating under.” Once, he even tried roping me into a lawsuit he filed against YouTuber Logan Paul, over Paul’s Flat Earth documentary, in which I’d had a fleeting appearance. I wrote a short article about the one-sided feud but otherwise avoided the matter.


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

One might also cite in the Pandemic Book of World Records Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta, whose yearly compensation was $55.9 million, 1,953 times as much as the company’s median worker pay of $28,608. As Barbara Ehrenreich writes, in what I believe is half-seriousness, Americans can’t actually “afford the rich, who drive up costs for everyone and require huge amounts of cash to sustain their lifestyles.” In short, income inequality isn’t something that you can see clearly when Mark Zuckerberg goes on holiday, paddleboarding at his $59 million compound: it involves an internalized illusion held by those who are victimized by it yet still believe what I call its “rich fictions,” and these delusional fables are part of what keeps ordinary people locked in the bootstraps belief system.


pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

This has largely worked, simply because the amount of damage a bad hack could cause was contained. Today, due to both the power of technology and the global nature of our economies, that’s no longer true. An economic system based on greed and self-interest only works when those properties can’t destroy the underlying system. And “Move fast and break things”—Mark Zuckerberg’s famous motto for Facebook—is only okay when it’s your own things you’re putting at risk. When someone else’s things are involved, then maybe you should think twice—or be forced to fix what you’ve broken. 23 “Too Big to Fail” The phrase “too big to fail” captures a critical vulnerability in our market economy.


pages: 317 words: 87,048

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

QAnon is much closer to a natural phenomenon, just like the real-world virus with which it coincided. There is no fun in vilifying the Covid-19 virus itself, and so we need it to be the creation (or invention) of someone malign: Xi Jinping, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci or all three in concert. Similarly, it’s easier to imagine QAnon as the product of Ron Watkins, or even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. While all three men helped QAnon spread and helped create the conditions in which it could thrive, none of them can be said to have any control over it, to run its doctrine. In the case of the latter two, they’ve never had a say in it. Digital pathogens make for terrible movie villains, but very real threats – and ones that will continue to evolve faster than we can, and which will strike ever more frequently.


pages: 332 words: 91,780

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity by Currid

barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Donald Trump, income inequality, index card, industrial cluster, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, place-making, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, prediction markets, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Fry, the long tail, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, winner-take-all economy

But with 400 million Facebook users worldwide, 2.5 million unique monthly visitors to PerezHilton.com, and 10 million unique monthly visitors to TMZ, we need to ask ourselves what we’re doing in following celebrities.16 We’re the very ones who sustain Houdini’s trick. According to Compete.com, U.S. Facebook membership alone had reached 132 million by December 2009.17 Users spend over fifty-five minutes a day on the site, and 35 million users worldwide update their status every day.18 Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, doesn’t see an end to these numbers: “Next year, Facebook users will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”19 One has to wonder why we care so much about people who for all intents and purposes could be fictional characters for how little impact they have on our real worlds.


A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution by Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, dual-use technology, Higgs boson, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zoonotic diseases

The University of Pennsylvania is conducting the first CRISPR-based clinical trial to be approved in the United States, with financial backing from Internet billionaire Sean Parker. A new biotech institute in San Francisco, affiliated with UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and Stanford University, is benefiting from a generous contribution of more than half a billion dollars from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan. And in the Bay Area, I had the privilege of launching the Innovative Genomics Institute, aimed at harnessing technologies like CRISPR to lead the revolution in genetic engineering and fight against disease. If these recent examples are any indication, the future of medicine will increasingly feature CRISPR and increasingly reflect new alliances and partnerships between public and private sponsors.


pages: 297 words: 89,206

Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage

Bullingdon Club, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, deskilling, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, moral panic, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, old-boy network, precariat, psychological pricing, Sloane Ranger, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, very high income, winner-take-all economy, young professional

When people reflect on their own economic situation their current income is significant, to be sure, but it is likely to be only one part of a much wider sense of their economic situation which is also based on their accumulated wealth from the past. We should not be deceived by dramatic rags-to-riches stories of highly unusual entrepreneurs, such as Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, to think that gaining a billion-dollar fortune can take place within a few years. As Bourdieu and Piketty remind us, accumulation is a long-term process.12 This absolute increase in wealth is divisive. It means that those who start with no wealth now have a much larger hill to climb in order to reach the top, or even the middle range of wealth-holders, compared to thirty years ago.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Certainly there has been a tendency in the US for those running high-tech companies and social network groups to insist on two-tier capital structures on flotation, so that they retain voting control even if they hold only a minority of the equity capital. Social network entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook have shown conspicuously little regard for outside shareholders. However high-handed this may appear, it is not entirely surprising. Facebook had no need of new capital on flotation. In most internet-based businesses, the chief reason for going public is to allow venture capitalists to cash in their chips, not to raise money.


pages: 282 words: 88,320

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson, Bill Breen

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disruptive innovation, financial independence, game design, global supply chain, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, Wall-E, work culture

It was a preposterous demand, especially for a game that would require somewhere between half a million and a million lines of code. The request signaled that the LEGO Group’s innermost value, “only the best,” would bump up against the disruptor’s “good enough” ethos, perhaps best expressed by a maxim credited to Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg: “Better done than perfect.” In the months and years to come, LEGO and NetDevil would ceaselessly struggle to smack back bugs and achieve a rough equilibrium between less than perfect and better than merely done. The disconnect between NetDevil and LEGO over Universe’s quality loomed larger as development got under way.


pages: 362 words: 95,782

Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, intermodal, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

‘I told you he was awesome,’ says Deirdra. In the afternoon we move on to Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the most famous, exclusive and prestigious private schools in the land, the ‘Eton of America’ that educated Daniel Webster, Gore Vidal, John Irving, and numerous other illustrious Americans all the way up to Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook as well as half the line-up of indie rockers Arcade Fire. The school has an endowment of one billion dollars. In this heady atmosphere of privilege, wealth, tradition and youthful glamour Mitt is given a harder time. The students question the honesty of his newly acquired anti-gay, anti-abortion ‘values’.


pages: 347 words: 90,234

You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction--From Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between by Lee Gutkind

airport security, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Columbine, David Sedaris, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Mark Zuckerberg, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, out of africa, personalized medicine, publish or perish, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, working poor, Year of Magical Thinking

In 2010, The King’s Speech starring Colin Firth was the movie to watch—it was the story of King George VI of Britain, his ascension to the throne, and the speech therapist who helped him control his stuttering so that he was able to address the British people with thoughtfulness and power. Following close behind in attention and vying for Oscar honors was The Social Network. This movie begins in the autumn of 2003 when Harvard undergrad and computer programming nerd Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, sits down in his dorm room and creates Facebook, triggering a revolution in communication and a multibillion dollar corporation. In both movies, the viewer learns a great deal about the two protagonists, as well as the cast of characters surrounding them and the temper of the times.


pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

The experts on these various topics, all intelligent and informed people, make predictions about the future that are not just a little different, but that are dramatically different and diametrically opposed to each other. So, why do Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates fear artificial intelligence (AI) and express concern that it may be a threat to humanity’s survival in the near future? And yet, why do an equally illustrious group, including Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Ng, and Pedro Domingos, find this viewpoint so farfetched as to be hardly even worth a rebuttal? Zuckerberg goes so far as to call people who peddle doomsday scenarios “pretty irresponsible,” while Andrew Ng, one of the greatest minds in AI alive today, says that such concerns are like worrying about “overpopulation on Mars.”


pages: 423 words: 92,798

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, antiwork, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, emotional labour, feminist movement, gentrification, hiring and firing, immigration reform, independent contractor, informal economy, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, new economy, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, precariat, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, The Chicago School, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, women in the workforce

My interest, borne out by the empirical cases that follow, is in understanding the power structures of ordinary people and how they themselves can come to better understand their own power. There’s plenty of evidence on the front pages of The New York Times that Mills’s elites still rule. The level of raw privilege that a Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Jamie Dimon presently possesses isn’t much different from that which Bertrand Russell described in his 1938 book Power as “priestly” and “kingly.”4 That helps explain why multinational CEOs were included, and indistinguishable from, the Pope, kings, and presidents in the many photos taken at the December 2015 climate talks.5 It doesn’t seem all that difficult to understand how today’s priestly-kingly-corporate class rules.


pages: 307 words: 90,634

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

Fed on a diet of inspirational quotes from their tech heroes (“Remembering that you are going to die,” said Jobs, “is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose”), the best developers and software-minded entrepreneurs stream into the Valley to make an impact, get a view of history in the making, make a chunk of money, or all of the above. And it works. Silicon Valley’s mind-set is one of embracing risk and not being afraid of failure (“In a world that’s changing really quickly,” said Mark Zuckerberg, “the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks”). Young acolytes are inculcated with these teachings, committing them to memory so they can recite them on demand. And then, for better or worse, they act on them. A 2012 Harvard Business School study estimated that 75 percent of start-ups fail—that is, they run out of money or fall to pieces before becoming profitable.


pages: 257 words: 90,857

Everything's Trash, but It's Okay by Phoebe Robinson

23andMe, Airbnb, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, feminist movement, Firefox, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, retail therapy, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft

However, it’s not just financial status; it’s also about how we display our real and/or imagined financial statuses. Some are dressed head to toe in the latest designer fashions despite being in massive amounts of debt, while others are serving affordable camp-counselor realness, yet they’re hella rich (ahem, Mark Zuckerberg). But except for an outlier like him, whose portfolio is public knowledge, there is a whole lot of keeping mum about money. I mean, a girlfriend will sooner tell me the deets of her sex life than reveal what’s in her bank account, and that’s because sharing sexcapades can now be considered a charming party trick while it’s still thought to be impolite or gauche to talk about money.


pages: 318 words: 87,570

Broken Markets: How High Frequency Trading and Predatory Practices on Wall Street Are Destroying Investor Confidence and Your Portfolio by Sal Arnuk, Joseph Saluzzi

algorithmic trading, automated trading system, Bernie Madoff, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Gordon Gekko, High speed trading, latency arbitrage, locking in a profit, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, National best bid and offer, payment for order flow, Ponzi scheme, price discovery process, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, Sergey Aleynikov, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, transaction costs, two-sided market, uptick rule, zero-sum game

IPOs that take longer than a year to consummate are priced below the low end of the range or break IPO price generally represent grave disappointment and potential financial disaster for their backers. 13. Call to Action Get ready, Mark. That incredible company you’ve been nurturing since Harvard is about to become one of the biggest casino chips on Wall Street. After trading in “private markets” among only sophisticated investors, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook plans to go public in one of the largest and highest profile events on Wall Street decades. We recently penned an open letter to the young CEO on our firm’s blog about who is likely to dominate the trading of his firm’s stock: You may be thinking that regardless which exchange you pick, your stock will help investors create wealth by investing in your company for the long term.


pages: 325 words: 90,659

Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, barriers to entry, bitcoin, business process, call centre, carbon credits, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, failed state, financial innovation, illegal immigration, Mark Zuckerberg, microcredit, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Skype, TED Talk, vertical integration

And all such sites depend on Bitcoin and TOR, both of which could be pulled from under their feet if the governments of the world decided to ban them. There is no sign of that for now. Germany’s finance ministry has recognized Bitcoin as a currency, meaning its users can be taxed. In the United States, the Winklevoss twins, the nearly men of the dotcom boom who claimed that Mark Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for Facebook from them, have poured money into creating a Bitcoin exchange. Most democratic governments have so far been reluctant to outlaw the TOR browser, on the basis that it has legitimate uses as well as nefarious ones. Britain’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology has argued against a ban, pointing out that TOR was extensively used during the “Arab Spring” of 2011, as well as by Western whistleblowers and undercover journalists.


pages: 319 words: 90,965

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

From there we walked across Harvard Yard, which is encircled by dorms that house freshmen. John pointed toward them while running down the standard list of famous Harvard alumni: Natalie Portman lived in that dorm; that’s the one where Tommy Lee Jones and Al Gore were roommates; this is where JFK and Teddy Roosevelt both lived; that’s where Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg bunked before dropping out. At several points John mentioned the extent to which various dorms have different degrees of luxuriousness and proximity to the main campus, which apparently matters quite a lot at Harvard, mirroring the intense and essentially insane status competition that consumes elite universities.


pages: 290 words: 94,968

Writing on the Wall: Social Media - the First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage

An Inconvenient Truth, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Evgeny Morozov, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, New Journalism, packet switching, place-making, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, social intelligence, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, yellow journalism

Its new owner, News Corp, treated it as a media outlet rather than a technology platform and seemed more interested in maximizing advertising revenue than in fixing or improving the site’s underlying technology. This proved to be a miscalculation. Just as MySpace had overtaken Friendster, MySpace found itself being surpassed in turn by Facebook, yet another new social-networking site. Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard University, had launched Facebook in 2004, initially for the sole use of Harvar purgatory right awayo IQd undergraduates, half of whom signed up in the first month. After this initial success he then gradually opened it up to wider use. First, students at other universities were admitted, then high school students and corporate users.


pages: 209 words: 89,619

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

Social media, such as Facebook, are also shrinking the zone of privacy, as users, predominantly young people, reveal, wittingly or unwittingly, their most intimate details to ‘friends’ and many others besides. Location-based services take this a step further, letting users alert ‘friends’ to where they are (and enabling businesses, the police, criminals and others to know too). Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and chief executive, told Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: ‘People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people . . . That social norm is just something that has evolved’. Surveillance prompts images of a ‘police state’, and certainly it starts with the police, strengthening a divide between the police and the watched.


pages: 305 words: 93,091

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick, Mikko Hypponen, Robert Vamosi

4chan, big-box store, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, connected car, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, incognito mode, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, Tesla Model S, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

And although merchants have started accepting Bitcoin, the service fees, typically paid by the merchant, have been transferred to the purchaser. Furthermore, unlike credit cards, Bitcoin permits no refunds or reimbursements. You can accumulate as much Bitcoin as you would hard currency. But despite its overall success (the Winklevoss brothers, famous for challenging Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook, are major investors in Bitcoin), the system has had some monumental failures as well. In 2004, Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange, declared bankruptcy after announcing that its Bitcoin had been stolen. There have been other reports of theft among Bitcoin exchanges, which, unlike most US bank accounts, are not insured.


pages: 313 words: 91,098

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

You can see this confusion in how we think about successful companies. Internet start-up entrepreneurs share a mistaken belief with the rest of us: that ideas matter. It is conventional wisdom that the key to a successful start-up is a good idea that can capture a market and produce millions of dollars. That’s how Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Steve Jobs of Apple did it. Because we assign intelligence to individuals, we give the heroes all the credit by attributing their ideas to them alone. But that’s not how it works, according to some of the venture capitalists who fund new start-ups. As one of them, Avin Rabheru, puts it: “Venture capitalists back teams, not ideas.”


pages: 282 words: 89,266

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016 by Stewart Lee

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, call centre, centre right, David Attenborough, Etonian, gentrification, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Livingstone, I presume, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, pre–internet, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Fry, trickle-down economics, wage slave, young professional

We are in a post-Thick of It world, where the fictional PR attack dog Malcolm Tucker seems, compared with those schooled by Lynton Crosby OBE, dancing in Dionysiac reverie on the ruins of democracy in a downpour of dead cats, to have been charmingly hampered by principle. But help is at hand. Pretty much all I have watched since Christmas 2014 is Italian westerns of the ’60s and ’70s. I have seen 108 now. And I started pursuing this monomaniacal psychological experiment long before Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook told us this week that we should all live “post-choice”, demonstrating his commitment to his aesthetic by displaying a wardrobe full of dozens of expensively identical shirts, all presumably tax deductible and purchased online via an account in Luxembourg. I’ve given up on twenty-first-century films, which are all about either outer space or a man being sad.


pages: 347 words: 91,318

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs by Gina Keating

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, company town, corporate raider, digital rights, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Netflix Prize, new economy, out of africa, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Superbowl ad, tech worker, telemarketer, warehouse automation, X Prize

Internet households confined their Web surfing to the curated universe of America Online, even though the revolutionary search engine Google.com, launched the same year as Netflix, was already available in twenty-six languages. On the e-commerce front, Amazon was still not profitable, and Apple’s online music store, iTunes, and its revolutionary portable music player, the iPod, were still closely guarded secrets. No one had ever heard of Facebook, because the social network’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was still in high school. The mainstream customers that Netflix needed were still renting at Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and Movie Gallery, so Hastings and Kilgore decided to take the battle to their rivals’ turfs. The idea wasn’t so much to get the bricks-and-mortar chains’ attentions as to define Netflix by contrasting it with better-known opponents.


pages: 324 words: 93,606

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, American Legislative Exchange Council, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, effective altruism, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, germ theory of disease, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Hollis, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school choice, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators

A typical article tends to read like this one, by Barry Ellsworth, in an op-ed for the online news bulletin Allvoices.com: ‘Charles and David Koch are at it again’, Ellsworth writes, this time using their wealth to back a creepy ‘Carenival’ complete with games, jugglers, knife throwers, and acrobats whose sole purpose is to scare people away from Obamacare … some billionaires like Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg use some of their vast riches to advance the cause of mankind through humanitarian donations. Then there are those like the coal-loving Koch brothers, who seem to delight in using their money to throw up roadblocks to programmes that would benefit the vast majority of Americans.38 The problem with this type of commentary is that it is a little like professing that you believe in democracy but only if your preferred party is the sole candidate.


pages: 326 words: 88,968

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

My good friend Rory Cullinan simply gets on and off his commuter train two stations away from his destination. If you live or work on a reasonably low floor of a high-rise, take the stairs. If your destination is a higher floor, get on and off the elevator halfway and proceed on foot. If you have a lot of face-to-face meetings and phone calls, do “walking meetings” like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. According to a 2014 study at Stanford University, walking meetings can even boost creativity by as much as 60 percent.34 When you drop by the store, park as far away from the entrance as possible. (Not only will you walk more but you will also spend less time driving in circles looking for a good parking spot.)


pages: 297 words: 88,890

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

When we look back on the period following the Great Recession, it will be remembered not as a time of great innovation, but of great exploitation, when tech companies reached “unicorn” status (valued over $1 billion) on the backs of employees they refused to even deign to label, let alone respect, as such. * * * The dynamics and overarching philosophy of Silicon Valley create the perfect conditions for fissured workplaces. Silicon Valley thinks the “old” way of work is broken. It loves overwork. Its ideology of “disruption”—to “move fast and break things,” as Mark Zuckerberg famously put it—is contingent on a willingness to destroy any semblance of a stable workplace. In the startup world, the ultimate goal is “going public”: creating a high enough stock valuation, and, afterward, unmitigated growth, no matter the human cost. That’s how these companies pay back the venture capital firms that invested in them—and that’s how they make their founders, boards, and early employees very rich.


Work! Consume! Die! by Boyle, Frankie

Boris Johnson, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, heat death of the universe, Jeffrey Epstein, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, millennium bug, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, open immigration, pez dispenser, Piper Alpha, presumed consent, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, the medium is the message, trade route, WikiLeaks

The words were taken from the Lib Dem election manifesto. Cameron wants the Chinese to lift their ban on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and find out what makes their economy so dynamic. David, they’re one and the same thing. Ban them in the UK too, and we might actually get some work done for a change. Mark Zuckerberg stands to make $25 billion from the sale of Facebook. That’s unless the CIA can come up with a better offer than the Chinese government. A model is warning Facebook users to be careful after she was duped into sending nude photographs to a man claiming to be Peter Andre. Her message is simple – you shouldn’t send explicit photographs to people unless you’re absolutely sure that they’re a celebrity that you haven’t met before.


pages: 292 words: 94,660

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

This tendency hands a powerful tool not just to extremists, but to any group—gun-rights activists, democratic pollsters, pug rescuers—that wants to recruit members, raise money, or influence policy. The innocent act of joining a Facebook group that draws us in among the likeminded may in fact be acting more powerfully on us than we’re aware. (This may help explain why Mark Zuckerberg made groups a strategic focus of the company in 2017: whether it’s skateboarding or an ideological position, the ties that bind a tribe make membership very compelling.) Our brains are built to have a much deeper emotional reaction to who we imagine we are and what we can do with other people like us (that’s the power of notions like freedom, country, principle) than to who we actually are (parents, friends, drivers of children to school).


pages: 290 words: 90,057

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy by Lawrence Ingrassia

air freight, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, data science, fake news, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Hacker News, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork

Tall and charming, with an easy smile and a winning personality, Dubin had studied improv on and off for eight years at Upright Citizens Brigade in New York City while dabbling in entrepreneurial ventures. As a side project, he started a social media network for travelers in 2006, not long after Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook. It never went anywhere. “My basement has a corner of what I call the failed business corner,” his mother would later tell a journalist. “And we have a number of things that we have bought and he made me invest in that he thought would be very successful businesses, which obviously they weren’t.”


pages: 420 words: 94,064

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

Days later, the company raised money, doubling its value from a year earlier to a record $6 billion. While unremarkable by Silicon Valley standards, it was a long way from where the company had started. Reddit was founded by University of Virginia roommates Huffman and Alexis Ohanian barely a year after Mark Zuckerberg started his company in a Harvard college dorm room with his roommates. The fact that it isn’t as advertiser-friendly, or as fertile ground for paid “influencers,” gave it a different financial trajectory than other social media companies. An iconic scene in The Social Network comes to mind as to how the founders’ paths diverged—the one where Sean Parker, played by Justin Timberlake, tells Zuckerberg and his former pal Eduardo Saverin that “a million dollars isn’t cool.


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

At the same time, information technology has opened a window of new investment opportunities and increased the productivity of the most productive workers. Moreover, in today’s knowledge-based economy, companies can scale to economy-wide success with little need for capital. Successful innovators need not share their success with investors. Successful individuals like Google’s Larry Page and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg look like corporations of a bygone capital-intensive era. Without much need for capital, start-ups become all-or-nothing lotteries. The chance for enormous payoffs attracts a larger number of more talented gamblers. More gamblers produce more outsized winners, and more innovation, too—whether the risk-adjusted returns are good, on average, or not.


pages: 328 words: 96,141

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

Facebook’s effort to increase access was often pitched as philanthropy or corporate social responsibility, but there was real money at stake for the firm. Not just American but also European and Chinese companies were eager to win African consumers over to more data-intensive services—if the telecom infrastructure could be put in place. The preflight destruction of Amos-6 was a dent in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s hopes to make a splash serving internet from space. On the day of the incident, he was making a surprise tour of African tech hubs—one whose timing on the day of the satellite launch was probably not coincidental. Writing from Nairobi, the internet billionaire said he was “deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent.”


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

For two decades now, elite liberals have been looking to the billionaire class to solve the problems we used to address with collective action and a strong public sector—a phenomenon sometimes called “phila­nthro­capit­alism.” Billionaire CEOs and celebrities—Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah, and always, for some reason, Bono—are treated less like normal people who are gifted in their fields and happen to be good at making a great deal of money, and more like demigods. Business Insider ran a listicle in 2011 headlined “10 Ways Bill Gates Is Saving the World”—a perfect distillation of the enormous powers and responsibilities being delegated to, and projected upon, this tiny clique and their charitable foundations.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Kennard, ‘The obscure legal system that lets corporations sue countries’, The Guardian, 10 June 2015. 52 P. Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (London: Allen Lane, 2015). 53 G. Alperovitz, ‘Distributing our technological inheritance’, Technology Review, 97 (7), 1994: 30–36; G. Alperovitz, ‘Does Mark Zuckerberg really deserve all that money?’, AlterNet, 9 March 2012. 54 G. Van Harten, M. C. Porterfield and K. P. Gallagher, Investment Provisions in Trade and Investment Treaties: The Need for Reform, Global Economic Governance Initiative Policy Brief 5 (Boston University, September 2015). Chapter 3 THE PLAGUE OF SUBSIDIES ‘Whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.’


pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

They were expected to overachieve, and even at the birthday party, Bettye exuded the air of a powerful matriarch presiding over her sons’ lives. She reveled in Fletcher’s accomplishments, led his philanthropic endeavors, and held down the fort in his office. Fletcher attended Harvard University, where he was very popular and even became president of a student club so exclusive it later rejected Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. There, Fletcher was accused of misappropriating funds but later was cleared. After graduation Fletcher accepted a job as a trader at Bear Stearns before moving on to Kidder, Peabody & Co. When he felt that he was paid an unfairly low bonus, he quit his job there and sued for racial discrimination.


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

This is why we hear surprisingly often that one of the “greats” in some field is a college dropout. When Bill Gates and Steve Jobs went to college, computer science was just one class out of several they took in a semester, but it was where they wanted to spend all their time. Even by the time Mark Zuckerberg arrived at Harvard, and computer science had become a popular major, the school couldn’t offer him enough coding coursework to keep him interested. Assertions like this should come with the obligatory warning label: Don’t assume that because Steve Jobs didn’t need a college degree, you don’t, either.


pages: 342 words: 99,390

The greatest trade ever: the behind-the-scenes story of how John Paulson defied Wall Street and made financial history by Gregory Zuckerman

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Ponzi scheme, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Robert Shiller, rolodex, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, technology bubble, zero-sum game

Just as impressive, Paulson managed to transform his trade in 2008 and early 2009 in dramatic form, scoring $5 billion more for his firm and clients, as well as $2 billion for himself. The moves put Paulson and his remarkable trade alongside Warren Buffett, George Soros, Bernard Baruch, and Jesse Livermore in Wall Street’'s pantheon of traders. They also made him one of the richest people in the world, wealthier than Steven Spielberg, Mark Zuckerberg, and David Rockefeller Sr. Even Paulson and the other bearish investors didn’'t foresee the degree of pain that would result from the housing tsunami and its related global ripples. By early 2009, losses by global banks and other firms were nearing $3 trillion while stock-market investors had lost more than $30 trillion.


pages: 301 words: 100,597

My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture by Guy Branum

bitcoin, different worldview, G4S, Google Glasses, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pets.com, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, tech billionaire, telemarketer

The summer before I went to law school, I was living at my parents’ house and had finally worked up the nerve to use the Internet to get naked photos of men. Some will rail against this broad presence of the salacious online, but I must respect it. The desire of people with dicks to look at the stuff that turns us on is a potent fuel that powered the Internet bubble that became Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune and the precipitous rise and fall of Pets.com. Yeah, stealing music is cool, but online porn is the stack of cinder blocks that built our current culture. And the thing is, in the long run, online porn is why I can get married in this country. It’s why we have an openly gay U.S. senator and a whole slate of Ryan Murphy productions on FX.


pages: 332 words: 100,601

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/ 8. ‘Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 2nd quarter 2015 (in millions)’. Statista. http://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ 9. Anders, George. 19 February 2014. ‘Facebook’s $19 Billion Craving, Explained By Mark Zuckerberg’. Forbes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/02/19/facebookjustifies-19-billion-by-awe-at-whatsapp-growth/ 3. Banking on government payments 1. 2013. ‘Report of the Committee on Comprehensive Financial Services for Small Businesses and Low Income Households’. Reserve Bank of India.


pages: 319 words: 100,984

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

The desire not to seem outmatched by China is one of the reasons that, under President Donald Trump, NASA has taken on a far more explicitly Moon-focused strategy, with an overt intention to return on a permanent and eventually moneymaking basis.12 But China is not the whole story. Billionaires matter too—particularly, though not exclusively, billionaires with Silicon Valley in their background. The path down which computer technology and software have travelled since the 1970s has concentrated a great deal of wealth into the hands of men now entering—Mark Zuckerberg, 35 in May 2019—enjoying—Jeff Bezos, 55 in January 2019—or leaving—Bill Gates, 64 in October 2019—middle age. A fair few of them still cherish the dream of spaceflight that Apollo, “Star Trek” or both lit in their hearts. Following that dream offers a way to spend money amassed from technologies closer to home on self-gratification, inspiration, ego jousting, the denting of the universe, preserving and enhancing the future of humankind, having fun, showing off and experiencing the sublime.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Harari has spoken movingly of the way his own coming out, as a gay man, has shaped his skepticism about human metanarratives as pervasive as heterosexuality and progress; and, though trained as a military historian, he has arrived in the spotlight of popular acclaim, praised by Bill Gates and Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg, as a sort of expositor of myth. The central exposition is this: society is and always has been bound together by collective fictions, no less now than in earlier eras, with values like progress and rationality taking the place once held by religion and superstition. Harari is a historian, but his worldview grafts the pretense of science onto the philosophical skepticism familiar from contrarians as diverse as David Hume and John Gray.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

Consider Facebook’s announcement, late in 2015, that it was increasing the range of one-click responses from the traditional “Like” to “Angry,” “Sad,” “Wow,” “Haha,” and “Love.” At first glance, it might have seemed that Facebook was expanding our conversational palate. As one newspaper reported, “Mark Zuckerberg hinted . . . that his site was looking to expand the Like button, making a way for people to communicate that they were upset by news.”33 But a moment’s thought reveals that this is nonsense. Facebook always offered people the option to communicate that they were upset by news—perhaps by typing, “I am upset by this news,” and adding some words of sympathy or advice.


pages: 407 words: 103,501

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

Ti Kan, Steve Scherf, and Graham Toal, the creators of CDDB, realized that the sequence of track lengths on a CD formed a unique signature that could be correlated with artist, album, and song names. Larry Page and Sergey Brin realized that a link is a vote. Marc Hedlund at Wesabe realized that every credit card swipe is also a vote, that there is hidden meaning in repeated visits to the same merchant. Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook realized that friend relationships online actually constitute a generalized social graph. They thus turn what at first appeared to be unstructured into structured data. And all of them used both machines and humans to do it. . . . >>> the rise of real time: a collective mind As it becomes more conversational, search has also gotten faster.


pages: 368 words: 96,825

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

A quick overview on the exponentially exploding world of crowdsourcing, today’s poor man’s version of artificial intelligence. More incredibly, today the exponential world is starting to overtake the crowd. Recently, an AI company called Vicarious, which is backed by such investors as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel, announced that their machine learning software achieved success rates up to 90 percent on CAPTCHAs from Google, Yahoo, PayPal, Captcha.com, and others.27 So stay tuned, since even the crowd can eventually be dematerialized and demonetized. But one use of the crowd that AI is unlikely to disrupt in the near term is the ability of people from around the world to send you cash to underwrite your ideas.


pages: 336 words: 95,773

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

And even for Millennials with sheepskin in hand ready to hit the job market, how much of a return exactly could we expect to reap from our hefty investments in higher education? Better not to ask. Estimates of a college wage premium are based on average levels of pay. It is not the case that all college graduates earn more than all people who only have high school diplomas—and this is true even excluding obvious outliers like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or any number of Hollywood celebrities, worthless college dropouts that they all are. If you took all the people without college diplomas and all the people with bachelor’s degrees and then ranked them in terms of earnings, the top 25 percent of high-school-only workers earn at least $50,000 per year, more than the lowest-earning 25 percent of BA holders.29 There is considerable overlap on the earnings scale between nondegree and degree holders.


pages: 335 words: 98,847

A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner by Chris Atkins

Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, Milgram experiment, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans

‘Well you have to prove that you’re acting of your own free will.’ I don’t point out that this challenge has evaded the finest philosophers for centuries, and give up. Wandsworth’s archaic bureaucracy adores paperwork and abhors IT. I’ve come from a world of instant messaging, clouds and artificial intelligence, run by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Now I’m up against slips, lists and general apps, run by Tracey and a leaky biro. One list I cannot get on is the one for family days. Once a month there are special extended visits, where prisoners can spend five hours with their kids. None of the officers have a clue how I sign up, so I start submitting a general app every three days. 12 September Today’s Times has an article about HMP Wandsworth: ‘Prison staff refused to accept more inmates into a jail because of the poor state of the cells … Damaged cells have been unusable for weeks, food serveries closed and windows left broken because of serious failings by Carillion, the construction and facilities management company.’4 These issues are all on E Wing, where I work every day doing the inductions.


pages: 365 words: 96,573

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor

Albert Einstein, epigenetics, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Khan Academy, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, off-the-grid, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, stem cell, TED Talk

The weight of the sloping head stresses the back muscles, leading to back pain; the kink in our necks adds pressure to the brain stem, triggering headaches and other neurological problems; the tilted angle of our faces stretches the skin down from the eyes, thins the upper lip, pulls flesh down on the nasal bone. Because “the village idiot stare” doesn’t sound scientific, Mike calls this posture “cranial dystrophy.” He claims it affects about 50 percent of the modern population, including Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. In January 2018, Mike uploaded a YouTube video warning Zuckerberg that he was going to die ten years early if he didn’t correct his cranial dystrophy posture. The message was viewed more than 9,000 times before it was deleted. Along with maintaining the correct oral posture, Mike recommended a series of tongue-thrusting exercises, which he says can train us out of the “death pose” and make breathing easier.


pages: 415 words: 103,801

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, rent control, Steve Jobs, trade route

When the Communists conquered Shanghai and seized the Kadoories’ and the Sassoons’ hotels and mansions and factories, the Kadoories retreated to the British colony of Hong Kong on China’s southern tip. The Sassoons fled to London and the Bahamas and even Dallas, Texas. But they never stopped thinking about Shanghai. The world of this book, much like our world today, was defined by innovation and globalization, growing inequality and political turmoil. Long before Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Microsoft, and Google grappled with how to deal with China and political pressures in the United States, the Sassoons and the Kadoories, with their offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Bombay, and London, mastered the global economy and struggled with the moral and political dilemmas of working with China.


pages: 352 words: 98,561

The City by Tony Norfield

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Irish property bubble, Leo Hollis, linked data, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game

This raised $16 billion for the company, and Facebook paid less than $200m to the banks organising it (bank fees are usually between 1 per cent and 4 per cent and this was at the low end of the range). This flotation turned all the shares, not just those newly issued, into assets priced on the market and at the time this gave Facebook a market capitalisation in excess of $100bn.14 As a result, Mark Zuckerberg and the original founders/owners accumulated tens of billions of dollars in new financial wealth. The market value of the company soared exponentially beyond any money they had invested in its operations. Not only this, the shares sold were mainly non-voting shares. Despite owning only 18 per cent of the company after the flotation, Zuckerberg had three times the voting rights – 57 per cent – and thus remained personally in control of it.15 Having been elevated into the higher realms of financial security calculations, in 2014 Facebook was able, with little or no input from investment banks, to acquire WhatsApp, a company that it judged to have a key position in an area important to its future growth.


pages: 285 words: 98,832

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, gentleman farmer, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, out of africa, precautionary principle, QAnon, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, tech bro, telemarketer, the new new thing, working poor, young professional

Here was the chance for the governor to say something that sounded at least vaguely hopeful! Shapiro became so excited that he said, We’re going to announce this tomorrow. They hadn’t. “It went into the bureaucracy and never came out,” said a person close to the process. “I never really understood why.” Someone raised the objection that the Biohub had Mark Zuckerberg’s name on it and that it might look bad, sort of like the state was handing out people’s medical information to Facebook. (Though that’s not what the state would be doing.) Someone else worried about the difficulty of routing the positives from various labs to the Biohub. Quest Diagnostics was just then processing, slowly, more of the state’s tests than any other lab.


pages: 599 words: 98,564

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

Aaron explained how their order system worked: “Like anything else you buy on Amazon, you buy one of the ethers and it gets you in on the waitlist for whatever project that you’re buying into.” Aaron believed that the biotechnology field should be completely unregulated. The free market would bring well-being to the people, he said. Imagining himself as the next Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, Aaron planned to bring a disruptive technology directly to consumers, government regulators and societal concerns be damned. * * * Aaron Traywick’s dreams for enhancing humanity seemed to be getting closer to reality in January 2018. The price of an Ethereum ether peaked at $1,432 as Ascendance Biomedical was about to go public with new findings and research initiatives.


pages: 375 words: 102,166

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, classic study, clean water, combinatorial explosion, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, desegregation, double helix, epigenetics, game design, George Floyd, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Scientific racism, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, twin studies, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

From here on out, unless I specifically refer to twins “reared apart,” I am talking about twins who are raised together in the same home. The basic logic of this type of twin study is probably familiar. Consider pairs of identical twins—the Weasley twins from Harry Potter; the Winklevii (Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss), who challenged Mark Zuckerberg’s claim to Facebook. Each pair began life as a single zygote, but a fluke in cell division during the early stages of development resulted in the formation of two zygotes from one. Identical, or monozygotic, twins are not 100 percent genetically identical 100 percent of the time, because, well, stuff happens.


pages: 347 words: 103,518

The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Anthropocene, basic income, Black Lives Matter, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, food desert, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, helicopter parent, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, Kintsugi, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Minecraft, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, rent stabilization, risk tolerance, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

And so instead of trying to turn them back to a system that’s been failing them, let’s design the thing that we would want to see for ourselves.” Lakisha Young isn’t Septima Clark. She’s no Communist, for one thing. Reach has been criticized since its founding as an Astroturf, or fake grassroots, organization. It gets its money from organizations like the Center on Reinventing Public Education, whose backers include Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and the Waltons, of Walmart fame. These funders are known for pressing for a slate of school reforms that traditional public school advocates, like teacher unions, criticize as a path to privatization. They include more charter schools, stricter accountability rules, and a bigger role for technology, data, and standardized testing.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

The only exponential we ever experience is when something is accelerating, like a car, or decelerating really sudden with a hard braking. And when that happens you feel very uncertain and uncomfortable…. The feeling being engendered now among a lot of people is that of always being in this state of acceleration.” New, ever-evolving technologies dominate modern life. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004. The iPhone didn’t exist until 2007. Tesla produced its first all-electric Roadster in 2008. The MRNA vaccines that protect against Covid-19 are a marvel of modern techno-science few understand. We increasingly live in an exponential world—but our brains are hardwired for the linear.


pages: 307 words: 101,998

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives by Chris Stedman

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, context collapse, COVID-19, deepfake, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, game design, gamification, gentrification, Google Earth, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Overton Window, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sentiment analysis, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TikTok, urban planning, urban renewal

We should care about what happens online the way we care about what happens elsewhere. Because when we care about what happens around us, when we are attentive to our lives instead of “safe” in withdrawal, life comes to have more meaning. Rather than stepping back or following Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s edict to “move fast and break things,” we should care about the things and people in our lives and treat them with care. Understand them not as expendable and replaceable but rather as things that could break—and that could break us if we lose them, like when the rabbit loses his boy, or when I lost my friend Alex.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

I’ll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell. I’ll teach it to let me know if anything is going on in Max’s room that I need to check on when I’m not with her. On the work side, it’ll help me visualize data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively.” Mark Zuckerberg, 3rd January 2016, via Facebook Living with your Personal Life Stream®1 Think about all of this computing power at our fingertips, all of this data and an increasingly smart collection of algorithms anticipating our needs and running interference for us. What would it be called? Until I come up with something better, I’m going with Life Stream, or maybe Life Cloud.


pages: 416 words: 108,370

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

The strongest signal that somebody enjoys a post on Facebook is liking it, sharing it, and leaving a comment. These likes, shares, and comments pour into an algorithm that is constantly reordering the feed to surface the most relevant stuff at the top. It’s a bit like opening each morning’s newspaper to find the front page is a reflection of the stories you read in previous weeks. In 2013 Mark Zuckerberg made the analogy himself, saying, “The goal is to build the perfect personalized newspaper for [more than a] billion people.” Facebook’s ability to watch its readers as they read is the dream of any publisher, going back to George Gallup.59 But it turns out that when a personalized newspaper holds up a perfect mirror before its audience, the reflection can be kind of gross.


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

It’s a difficult balance to strike, and the Fund is still trying to get it right. NorTech’s Bagley suggested that they are getting close: “The clarity of focus helps to engage networks,” but once there is a common goal and strategy, “everybody goes off and [works] opportunistically.” Too many metropolitan areas are still looking for the next Bill Gates, Michael Dell, or Mark Zuckerberg, the next hero. But there is a growing appreciation of the power of networks. In his 2012 TED talk, “Be the Entrepreneur of Your Own Life,” the venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn, extolled the power of “network literacy,” which is, he said, “absolutely critical to how we’ll navigate the world.”


pages: 437 words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

As we have seen, Facebook decided in 2016 to change its algorithm to prioritize posts by friends and family members over those of news publishers like the Wall Street Journal or Huffington Post.48 That means that what you see on Facebook will depend more on who your friends are, what they share, and what you click on. The change is highly likely to increase the echo chamber effect. “Spend time viewing.” Facebook itself has a distinctive view about how to think about this situation. As Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder, chair, and chief executive officer of Facebook, once remarked, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests than people dying in Africa.”49 A clear example of the company’s commitment to consumer sovereignty is an upbeat blog post written by two people at the company in 2016.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

PayPal cofounder and serial entrepreneur Max Levchin also comes from a family that fled Kiev to seek political asylum in the United States. Science and technology companies in Silicon Valley, London, and Berlin are teeming with Ukrainian engineers. Ukraine’s black hat hackers-for-hire are some of the best in the world. At the very moment Koum and Mark Zuckerberg were finalizing their deal, female entrepreneurs in Ukraine were preparing for an event called Startup Weekend Kyiv. Soon after the breakout of protests, the group’s website read: “Due to political turmoil this event has been postponed.” Mired in corruption, kleptocracy, and authoritarianism, Ukraine has not nurtured the Koums of its future.


pages: 390 words: 108,171

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

But in an effort to save time, SpaceX had loaded the multimillion-dollar satellite on the rocket ahead of the test fire, a decision that in retrospect looked foolish and needlessly risky. Standard practice, and perhaps common sense, said to wait until after the fiery test, when the rocket had been cleared to go. But SpaceX liked to push the envelope, and was trying to move fast to get through its backlog of launches. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, was in Africa when he got the news. “As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent,” he wrote on Facebook.


pages: 381 words: 111,629

The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, Dr. Elissa Epel

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive load, epigenetics, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meta-analysis, mouse model, persistent metabolic adaptation, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, survivorship bias, The Spirit Level, twin studies

., “Chronic Stress and Mitochondria Function in Humans,” under review. 6. Varela, F. J., E. Thompson, and E. Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 7. “Zuckerberg: One in Seven People on the Planet Used Facebook on Monday,” Guardian, August 28, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/27/facebook-1bn-users-day-mark-zuckerberg, accessed October 26, 2015; and “Number of Monthly Active Facebook Users Worldwide as of 1st Quarter 2016 (in Millions),” Statista, http://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/. We thank the many authors and organizations that allowed us permissions to reprint scales and figures.


The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Geoffrey Hinton, an early pioneer in neural networks, and his students presented a paper reporting that neural networks with many layers were remarkably good at recognizing objects in images.4 These networks weren’t just better than the state-of-the-art computer vision at object recognition—they were in a different, higher league, much closer to human levels of performance. The New York Times ran an article on deep learning, and Facebook announced a new AI lab with Yann LeCun, another deep learning pioneer, as the founding director. The participation of Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, at the NIPS deep learning workshop that year was a security headache but a huge draw, which required an overflow room with a video feed. At the reception afterward, I was introduced to Zuckerberg, who asked me questions about the brain. He had a particular interest in the theory of mind.


pages: 409 words: 105,551

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Chelsea Manning, clockwork universe, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, Ida Tarbell, information security, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, job automation, job satisfaction, John Nash: game theory, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pneumatic tube, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

People are more connected, more mobile, and move faster than ever before. By lowering what economists call the “barriers to entry”—prohibitive costs associated with entering a market—these changes have ushered in a universe of new possibilities for players operating outside the conventional systems: Mark Zuckerberg, without family connections, starting capital, or an undergraduate degree, changed the world before hitting his mid-twenties; Justin Bieber posted a self-made video online in 2007 and has since sold 15 million albums, accruing close to $200 million in personal wealth; and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, buoyed by online bomb-making instructions and the power to recruit and disseminate propaganda worldwide, incited a war.


pages: 375 words: 105,067

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry by Helaine Olen

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, game design, greed is good, high net worth, impulse control, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, Kevin Roose, London Whale, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, éminence grise

Between you and Rachel Ray? What’s the difference between you and the guys who launched MySpace or Facebook?… I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not that these people were born into money. While Rachel Ray was indeed quite middle-class, it would be a stretch to say the same of Warren Buffett or Mark Zuckerberg. Buffett’s dad was a prominent United States congressman and Zuckerberg’s dad is a dentist in wealthy Westchester County, New York, who could afford to send his son to the elite Phillips Exeter Academy boarding school. In fact, the nation’s class mobility was significantly lower than that of supposedly socially stratified latte-loving Europe.


pages: 440 words: 108,137

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

Robber barons of the Gilded Age, feeling pressure to justify growing accumulations of wealth, extended charitable giving to the poor to the national level, often creating charitable foundations in their names dedicated to helping those less fortunate than themselves. More recently, billionaires Bill Gates (Microsoft), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathway), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) have pledged to eventually give the bulk of their fortunes to charity. However, with some such notable exceptions, there appears to have been a general historical decline in the ethos of noblesse oblige among those who have amassed new fortunes since the end of World War II (Hall and Marcus 1998).


pages: 356 words: 105,533

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, bash_history, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Gordon Gekko, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, High speed trading, information security, Jim Simons, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, latency arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, market microstructure, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, seminal paper, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, South China Sea, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stochastic process, three-martini lunch, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uptick rule, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Those friends were the liquidity Facebook needed to dominate the competition and eventually become the largest social network in the world. For Island, it was innovations such as maker-taker that were leaving most of its competitors in the dust, pulling in more buyers and sellers. Levine, of course, was no Mark Zuckerberg. He had no grand designs on becoming a power mogul with private jets and sprawling mansions (that was Jeff Citron). Levine was a true believer on a singular mission—to make the market free. Wealth was simply a by-product of the mission. Even if the money hadn’t been there, he would have done it all anyway.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

There are still a considerable number of giant companies that have a dominant shareholder, who owns sufficient shares that he/she/it can usually determine the company’s future. Such a shareholder is described as owning a controlling stake, usually defined as anything upwards of 20 per cent of the voting shares. Mark Zuckerberg, who owns 28 per cent of Facebook, is a dominant shareholder. The Wallenberg family of Sweden is the dominant shareholder in Saab (40 per cent), Electrolux (30 per cent) and Ericsson (20 per cent). Most large companies don’t have one controlling shareholder. Their (share) ownership is so dispersed that no single shareholder has effective control.


pages: 324 words: 106,699

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, disinformation, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, information security, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, peak oil, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, trade route, WikiLeaks, zero day

I suspect this is because I’d had to write them with the expectation that their words truly mattered—since the entire purpose of the enterprise was for somebody in Real Life to actually care about them, and, by extension, about me. I’d joined a website called HotOrNot.com, which was the most popular of the rating sites of the early 2000s, like RateMyFace and AmIHot. (Their most effective features were combined by a young Mark Zuckerberg into a site called FaceMash, which later became Facebook.) HotOrNot was the most popular of these pre-Facebook rating sites for a simple reason: it was the best of the few that had a dating component. Basically, how it worked was that users voted on each other’s photos: Hot or Not. An extra function for registered users such as myself was the ability to contact other registered users, if each had rated the other’s photos Hot and clicked “Meet Me.”


pages: 401 words: 109,892

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

Facebook’s model is not so different from that of older media companies, newspapers, radios, and television networks. The main difference is in content and cost structure. Facebook does not produce any content. The content is you, your pictures and your videos, and your friends’ pictures and videos. In a sense, you buy from yourself and Facebook takes a cut. That is a pretty smart business model. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated, “We provide the social technology. They provide the music.” The other difference is that Facebook knows a lot about you, and your friends, and your family. As a result, Facebook can target its ads very precisely. That’s what advertisers like. It’s also what creates political risks for Facebook.


pages: 407 words: 104,622

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

I told Patterson that I wanted to write a book about how James Simons, Renaissance’s founder, had created the greatest moneymaking machine in financial history. Renaissance generated so much wealth that Simons and his colleagues had begun to wield enormous influence in the worlds of politics, science, education, and philanthropy. Anticipating dramatic societal shifts, Simons harnessed algorithms, computer models, and big data before Mark Zuckerberg and his peers had a chance to finish nursery school. Patterson wasn’t very encouraging. By then, Simons and his representatives had told me they weren’t going to provide much help, either. Renaissance executives and others close to Simons—even those I once considered friends—wouldn’t return my calls or emails.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

By 2016 Emily Bell, professor at the Tow Center at Columbia University, was capturing the general sense of the time in saying, ‘The prognostication game has hitherto been about the speed at which newspapers will go out of print. Now it shifts up a gear to the more pressing question of which companies will start to jettison websites and other digital infrastructure accumulated in the past two decades.’ At the start of 2015, Mark Zuckerberg and senior Facebook executives were making some bold claims. ‘We’re entering this new golden age of video,’ Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.’


pages: 404 words: 110,290

Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain by Ed Husain

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, Jeremy Corbyn, Khyber Pass, Mark Zuckerberg, Ronald Reagan, Shamima Begum

Ibn Khaldun was no abstract theorist: he was famed for his practical thinking. When the Mongol conqueror Tamerlane was on the outskirts of Damascus in 1401, he summoned Ibn Khaldun to converse for hours about what causes the rise and fall of civilisations. President Ronald Reagan, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have all cited Ibn Khaldun, but none has tried to unpack his insight on the rise and fall of countries and civilisations based on the energy and synergy of group-feeling. In the modern world, the idea that comes closest to the force that Ibn Khaldun identified is patriotism. The English philosopher Roger Scruton defined patriotism as a feeling ‘based on respect and love for the form of life that we have.


Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt

4chan, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game

Driven in turns by organic growth and press from the site’s stunts, online and off, 4chan’s traffic ballooned to seven million visitors a day by early 2010. Now an Internet celebrity thanks to the Time poll, moot transformed from a teenage purveyor of Japanese cartoons into an impassioned advocate for 4chan’s “radical anonymity.” In a conversation with MIT Technology Review, he positioned himself as the antithesis to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who had famously declared that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” (Hoo boy.) The way moot saw it, 4chan had become something more than an online cantina for people obsessed with anime, porn, video games, and anime-porn video games, of which there were many.


CRISPR People by Henry T. Greely

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, clean water, CRISPR, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Gregor Mendel, Ian Bogost, Isaac Newton, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, special economic zone, stem cell, synthetic biology, traumatic brain injury, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

He has won a variety of international scientific prizes and has been involved in the founding of at least seven companies. Since 2016 he has been a copresident of the “BioHub,” a collaboration between Stanford, UC San Francisco, and UC Berkeley that is supported by $600 million from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Quake has made contributions in a variety of fields, but his core expertise is in dealing with very small biological quantities or entities. He has done important work in microfluidics and in singlemolecule biophysics, including sequencing DNA from single cells. I was particularly impressed with how he used his technology for DNA sequencing to create noninvasive prenatal tests, based on fetal DNA found in the bloodstream of pregnant women.9 I think of him as Stanford’s non–“out there” version of George Church—unlike Church, I’ve found Quake very careful and deliberate in his statements about his science and its social implications.


pages: 395 words: 103,437

Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer's Insights Into North Korea's Enigmatic Young Dictator by Jung H. Pak

anti-communist, Boeing 747, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cryptocurrency, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, new economy, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, uranium enrichment

The conventional wisdom about the potential for the Internet and related technology to open new—and unfettered—spaces for communication simply does not apply. Suki Kim, who taught elite North Korean students in Pyongyang, observed that the teenagers did not know anything about the revolution in information and social networking as pioneered by the likes of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Martyn Williams, a technology specialist, explains how Kim’s regime “is doing something that no other country has done: building a nationwide intranet that offers email and websites but is totally shut off from the rest of the world. It’s an audacious attempt to usher in some of the benefits of electronic communications while maintaining complete control on an entire population.”


pages: 387 words: 106,753

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

According to Hamm, these impulses include 1) loyalty to colleagues who may lack the skills to fulfill evolving leadership roles, 2) a relentless focus on executing today’s “to-do list” at the expense of thinking strategically, and 3) working in isolation instead of with management team members or ecosystem partners, which is especially prevalent among founders who excel at product development. Founders who successfully led their firms through the scaling phase and beyond come readily to mind—Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk. However, these entrepreneurs are the exception rather than the rule. Despite coaching, most founder/CEOs cannot master the skills required to lead a larger, more complex startup. According to research by Yeshiva University’s Noam Wasserman, 61 percent of founders who held the CEO role when their ventures launched were no longer in that role after their firms raised Series D financing.


pages: 363 words: 109,834

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

What should have been seen, but was not, is that the sharp reduction in implicit consumer costs was delivered by systems with huge network effects. That is, Google search dramatically reduced the cost of finding information, and the more people who used Google search, the better Google search got, so that its value to consumers became higher and higher even as the price remained zero. In 2003 Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard sophomore, wrote software for Facemash, which provided photos of female students, side by side. The game was to decide which one was “hotter.” Soon after, he wrote TheFacebook, an application that allowed Harvard students to post their own photos and information about themselves. By 2007 Facebook had burst out of the college scene and had millions of users and one hundred thousand business pages.


pages: 351 words: 112,079

Gene Eating: The Science of Obesity and the Truth About Dieting by Giles Yeo

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, delayed gratification, Drosophila, Easter island, Gregor Mendel, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, nudge theory, post-truth, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, twin studies, Wall-E, zoonotic diseases

PART 4 A problem of our time ‘One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated’. —Thomas More ‘The significant problems of our time cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them’. — Albert Einstein ‘The question isn’t, “What do we want to know about people?” it’s “What do people want to tell about themselves?’” — Mark Zuckerberg CHAPTER 10 Eat like this and look like me Like two billion other people in the world, I have a Facebook profile. I’ve got about 400 ‘friends’, give or take. There is family of course (hi Mom!), and some are actual ‘active friends’, whom I meet, either regularly or periodically, depending on where in the world they live, and we go out for a meal, or a drink, or a movie; you know, friend stuff.


pages: 338 words: 104,815

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

George Lifchits, Duncan Watts, and a team of researchers in psychology, sociology, and computer science made this point in a study published in 2021. They picked a common narrative from the business media that college dropouts are unusually likely to create startup companies that turn into “unicorns,” which are privately owned firms valued at $1 billion or more.13 Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg are famous examples, but they are the exceptions, not the rule. Chris, his collaborator Jonathan Wai, and their colleagues found that as of 2015, virtually all of the 253 unicorn founders and CEOs had graduated from college, and many had earned graduate degrees. By contrast, fewer than half of American adults ever earn a college degree.14 In the Lifchits study, each participant was told that there is disagreement about whether a startup company is more likely to reach unicorn status if it is founded by a college graduate or by a college dropout.


pages: 368 words: 102,379

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, global pandemic, global supply chain, Internet Archive, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, ransomware, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, uber lyft, Y2K

Next, Kennedy conflated disparate anxieties to suggest a broad conspiracy to control freethinking Americans. “We’re seeing an onslaught of authoritarian clampdown and a giant shift of wealth from the middle class, which is just being obliterated by the quarantine, to the wealthiest people, the people like [Bill] Gates and Elon Musk and [Mark] Zuckerberg and all of the people who kind of own Silicon Valley and own 5G, and many of them also own vaccines.” In one breath, Kennedy managed to evoke our deepest societal fears and resentments and associate them with outlandish fantasies such as that Microsoft founder Bill Gates had sneaked microchips into the vaccine or that COVID-19 was actually caused by the advent of 5G cellular infrastructure.


pages: 322 words: 106,663

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo by Rebecca Walker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, call centre, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, export processing zone, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, neurotypical, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator

It was based on the admission that my wealth is partly tied to your poverty. It was scary and guilt-provoking to admit, but we were forced to recognize that our families made their wealth by extracting the labor of workers or refining the raw materials of the earth. Our accumulated wealth did not take place in a vacuum—it was at the expense of someone else. Mark Zuckerberg made his billions by selling the data of Facebook users to advertising companies. Jeff Bezos made his billions by putting innumerable independent stores out of business. There is always a component of exploitation behind massive accumulation. My family’s accumulation was no different, and my role was to begin to undo this.


pages: 360 words: 113,429

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman

American ideology, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, gig economy, high net worth, income inequality, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, mental accounting, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, plutocrats, precariat, school choice, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Represented as hard workers who used their smarts to get ahead, good rich people are also often seen as minimalist consumers. Buffett, despite his billions, has famously lived since the 1950s in the same modest house in Omaha. Silicon Valley billionaires are known for their understated self-presentation (think of Jobs’s black mock turtleneck or Mark Zuckerberg’s gray sweatshirt).24 Gates, Buffet, Zuckerberg, and others are also lauded for their significant philanthropic enterprises across the country and the globe. Possessing a down-to-earth affect is another plus; in 2004 George W. Bush, despite his own extraordinary wealth and exclusive upbringing, managed to paint his opponent for the presidency, John Kerry, as an elite snob, while representing himself as the guy voters could imagine themselves having a beer with.


pages: 396 words: 117,149

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

I will be your humble guide in part one, from here to the edge of the known world. Do I hear you protest that you don’t know enough, or algorithms are not your forte? Fear not. Computer science is still young, and unlike in physics or biology, you don’t need a PhD to start a revolution. (Just ask Bill Gates, Messrs. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, or Mark Zuckerberg.) Insight and persistence are what counts. Are you ready? Our journey begins with a visit to the symbolists, the tribe with the oldest roots. CHAPTER THREE Hume’s Problem of Induction Are you a rationalist or an empiricist? Rationalists believe that the senses deceive and that logical reasoning is the only sure path to knowledge.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Symbols of democratic flatness do persist in west coast companies, and chief executives behave less like feudal overlords – but more like oracles, prophets or deities, their pronouncements treated with reverence. As the economist Tom Hazlett put it to me after reciting some of the wide-eyed optimism being expressed about the new sharing economy we are supposedly inventing: ‘There sure are a lot of billionaires in the new wiki-economy.’ In filing for Facebook’s initial public offering in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg stated his desire that the world’s information infrastructure should be ‘a network built from the bottom up, or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top–down structure that has existed to date’. Steven Johnson points out that Zuckerberg none the less controls 57 per cent of the company’s shares, and comments wryly that ‘top–down control is a habit that will be hard to shake’.


pages: 541 words: 109,698

Mining the Social Web: Finding Needles in the Social Haystack by Matthew A. Russell

Andy Rubin, business logic, Climategate, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, folksonomy, full text search, Georg Cantor, Google Earth, information retrieval, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, NP-complete, power law, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, sparse data, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, text mining, traveling salesman, Turing test, web application

When we look back years from now, it may well seem obvious that the second- and third-level effects created by an inherently social web were necessary enablers for the realization of a truly semantic web. The gap between the two seems to be closing. * * * [1] See the opening paragraph of Chapter 9. [2] Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, was named Person of the Year for 2010 by Time magazine (http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037183_2037185,00.html) [3] See http://journal.planetwork.net/article.php?lab=reed0704 for another perspective on the social web that focuses on digital identities.


pages: 393 words: 115,217

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

In 2004, for example, when Facebook launched, many social networks had tried and failed to win the loyalty of users who hopped from one network to the next: Classmates, Sixdegrees, Care2, AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, KiwiBox, LiveJournal, StumbleUpon, Elfwood, Meetup, Dodgeball, Delicious, Tribe, Hub Culture, hi5, aSmallWorld, and others. As Mark Zuckerberg met with investors to raise funds for his new startup, users were just beginning to abandon the most recent social network success story, Friendster, for MySpace. Most investors concluded the websites were like clothing fads. Users switched networks like they switched jeans. Investors passed.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

He therefore theorized the opposite conclusion, which turned out to be correct: that the areas with holes represented areas where aircraft could be shot and still return safely, whereas the areas without holes probably contained areas that, if hit, would cause the planes to go down. Similarly, if you look at tech CEOs like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, you might conclude that dropping out of school to pursue your dreams is a fine idea. However, you’d be thinking only of the people that “survived.” You’re missing all the dropouts who did not make it to the top. Architecture presents a more everyday example: Old buildings generally seem to be more beautiful than their modern counterparts.


pages: 561 words: 114,843

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website by Matt Blumberg

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Broken windows theory, crowdsourcing, deskilling, fear of failure, financial engineering, high batting average, high net worth, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, performance metric, pets.com, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype

Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic,” speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910 FOREWORD The public face of a startup CEO can seem pretty glamorous—dramatic product announcements, exciting travel and speaking appearances, leading a team as it grows and takes steps to fulfill its mission. What you don’t see is what a CEO does on a regular basis, day after day after day. Nobody imagines Google CEO Larry Page working out the mechanics of the option pool or the global sales team’s reporting structure and The Social Network certainly didn’t include a montage of Mark Zuckerberg interviewing potential executives about the finer points of operating leverage. These, nonetheless, are the types of things that CEOs spend the vast majority of their time doing (as more than a couple of once-eager entrepreneurs have learned, to their dismay). One startup CEO I know who has made those realities central to his public persona is Return Path’s CEO, Matt Blumberg.


pages: 397 words: 110,130

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

Today, plenty of similarly powerful forces eagerly observe your online behavior. Firms like Facebook are free only because they carefully collect our ambient signals, the better to sell us to advertisers. (As the joke goes, if you’re not paying for a service, it’s because you’re the product.) Indeed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explicitly favors context collapse. He has said he believes there’s something shady about having different sides to your personality. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. . . .


pages: 406 words: 113,841

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Ideally, she argued, one would go further down this road, with the government sending monthly checks to all Americans, regardless of income. Those who fell below certain income thresholds would get to keep this money; for those above it, the money would be recouped through a series of banded income tax levels at the end of each tax year. Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg would get their checks as regularly as would an out-of-work single mother. But whereas the impoverished lady would keep it, Buffett and Zuckerberg would be expected to pay it back. Do this, she argued, with all the fervor of a convert to a cause, and one could do away with a slew of other bureaucratic, and costly-to-implement subsidies and social programs.


pages: 390 words: 114,538

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

Within Microsoft, ‘Google Compete’ had become a priority: ‘Google’s search and office apps [Docs and Spreadsheets, an online-only product costing $50 per person per year] were certainly on Microsoft’s competitive radar’, one former employee from the time told me, ‘though there wasn’t as much of a feeling that they’d taken off with the market as there was with Apple [and the iPod].’ Friends The priority of ‘Google Compete’ meant that, when in 2007 Facebook began to emerge as a viable threat to Google, Microsoft didn’t hesitate to court it. Facebook was different from almost every other site that preceded it. First, it was run by Mark Zuckerberg, a near-obsessive who stirred interest via clever tweaks: for example, each new college that wanted to join had to get a minimum number of recruits before being added to the system, which helped build excitement. But it also put all its content behind a wall. Google and other search engines were explicitly forbidden from ‘crawling’ many parts of the site by the contents of the ‘robots.txt’ file.


A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, public intellectual, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons

They started companies: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak established Apple; Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed Microsoft. Then, in the 1990s, along came the Internet to connect all of ­t hose personal computers, and the ­people using them. Another round of eccentric nerds (still all young white men)—­Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg among them—­gave us Amazon, Google, Facebook, and the fiefdoms of Silicon Valley. Walter Isaac­son’s The Innovators expands the popu­lar narrative of digital history to include less familiar contributors such as the nineteenth-­century mathematician Charles Babbage and the twentieth-­century computing visionary J.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

But he became interested in computer programming, went to university and then dropped out to start working at Yahoo, then the hottest thing in the internet world. There he met Brian Acton, an American computer programmer. By then the iPhone had just been launched and they spotted the opportunity to develop a messaging app. Together they ended up founding WhatsApp. Almost immediately, WhatsApp was a huge success. It grew and grew and grew. Soon Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook came calling. He was so impressed with WhatsApp that Facebook ended up buying it for $19 billion (£14.6 billion). So the story behind the amazing app that so many of us use to send messages involves an immigrant who studies hard, gets a job in a diverse workplace, meets a local partner and together they start a business that changes the world.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

Left Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren go even further and demand “college for all.” Not everyone can be a winner, however you design the game. In some fields such as law, medicine, technology, and some corners of business, “winner-takes-all” markets have provided exceptional rewards to exceptional people—people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk—who have both high cognitive skills and practical knowledge of something that gives them a big first-mover advantage in new digital markets. Below them is a wider group of highly educated—and highly credentialized—people from top universities who have the intelligence and personality attributes to propel them into the top layer of jobs.


pages: 342 words: 114,118

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

Or is it a problem without a solution, one that could culminate in war or revolution? * * * — I remembered one of the last meetings I attended with Obama overseas. We were in Lima, Peru, for a summit of Asia Pacific nations less than three weeks after Trump’s election. Before doing a town hall with a few hundred young people, Obama met briefly with Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook was a corporate partner of the summit we were attending. In the weeks since the U.S. election, it had become clear just how symbiotic Facebook’s model was to Trump’s victory. Cannibalizing traditional media that dealt in facts by posting unverified stories for free (and selling ads).


pages: 409 words: 112,055

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

Venture Tourism and Thin Peanut Butter If anyone can be blamed for this state of affairs it is Silicon Valley. And if we reserve a special place in cybersecurity hell for the enablers of vice, then Sand Hill Road should burn. The tech start-up battle cry of “Move fast and break things,” originally coined by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has been pushed by the venture capitalists of the Valley in an effort to build large, monolithic monopolies at the expense of consumers, regulations, ethics, and cybersecurity. And move fast and break things they did, from the now antiquated concept of stable employment to a free press to U.S. elections.


pages: 414 words: 117,581

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

I said, ‘Don’t sue it, just buy it. We could put top-level content on it. . . . That’ll win.’” The answer was still no. Google would end up paying $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube later in 2006. Separately, in July 2006, Facebook was being shopped around with a $1 billion price tag by founder Mark Zuckerberg and his business partners. Yahoo held talks but balked at the price. Miller told Zuckerberg he could offer $1.1 billion. The founder expressed disdain for AOL but said he would do a deal for $1.4 billion. “So I went to Jeff [Bewkes] and said, ‘You’re not going to like this. It’s not making money.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Nor does this imply that people make up the difference with greater productivity when they hit middle age. In fact all that extra work doesn't increase people's potential in the long run. Does age matter? Newton was twenty-three when he made many discoveries; Steve Jobs was twenty-one when he cofounded Apple, while Mark Zuckerberg was nineteen when he founded Facebook. Mozart, Évariste Galois, Mary Shelley, Alexander the Great . . . Plenty of people achieved a lot in their early twenties or younger. Moreover, when knowledge undergoes a revolution, the average age of significant contributors falls. The stock of knowledge in post-revolutionary fields is lower; there are fewer barriers to entry; and younger people, not institutionalised in the old ways, are free to rampage across fresh terrain.


pages: 385 words: 112,842

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

From the moment your order is received to the moment it goes onto a truck to leave an Amazon fulfillment center, the time elapsed is usually between forty-five minutes and two hours. Figuring out how to make that happen is a triumph of computation, software engineering, and artificial intelligence on a par with getting you fast search results from Google or making sure Mark Zuckerberg gets his thousandth of a cent every time you tap on an ad for a novelty T-shirt on Instagram. It is, in other words, one of the hardest and most complicated problems ever solved by humanity. The central challenge of figuring out which USB charger in which bin in which shelf atop which drive unit in which fulfillment center should be yours is that this problem includes predicting the behavior of dozens or even hundreds of people, machines, and systems whose behavior is, to one degree or another, random.


pages: 831 words: 110,299

Lonely Planet Kauai by Lonely Planet, Adam Karlin, Greg Benchwick

call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Easter island, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Paradox of Choice, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, union organizing

Put together a beach picnic from the salad bar, smoothie station and weighable bulk-foods section (dried fruit, nuts and such), but beware that prices can sneak up on you. Bubba's BurgersBURGERS$ ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %808-826-7839; www.bubbaburger.com/bb-hanalei.html; 5-5161 Kuhio Hwy; burgers $4-10; h10:30am-8pm) There is always a line and if you eat meat, you must at least try Kauaʻi's answer to In-N-Out. Even Mark Zuckerberg and his wife did when they were house (ahem, ranch) shopping on the North Shore. The signature Bubba comes with mustard relish and diced onions, the Slopper is served open-faced and smothered with chili. It does teriyaki burgers too, and all the beef is grass fed and Kauaʻi grown. We suggest a double, as the patties are thin.


pages: 370 words: 112,809

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

This is a changing landscape, and while our romantic patterns have always been the last taboo in social engineering, we need to recognize that technological design matters in the shaping of our contemporary intimate relations. Swipes and Gripes Like Facebook, which was started by the college-aged Mark Zuckerberg—who was inspired by a “hot or not” college site that rated pictures of female students—Tinder was started by two college fraternity brothers, Justin Mateen and Sean Rad, in Southern California, along with Jonathan Badeen, Dinesh Moorjani, Joe Munoz, and Whitney Wolfe (now Whitney Wolfe Herd).


pages: 400 words: 124,678

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research by Michael Shearn

accelerated depreciation, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, do what you love, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, Network effects, PalmPilot, pink-collar, risk tolerance, shareholder value, six sigma, Skype, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, technology bubble, Teledyne, time value of money, transaction costs, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

A truly passionate CEO would say the business is not for sale and would decline these overtures. In contrast, most CEOs would sell if the price was right. What if you were offered $1 billion for a business generating an estimated $50 million in revenues? Would you sell it because it was an extremely high offer? This was the situation faced by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of online social network Facebook, in 2006 when he was courted by managers from Viacom, Yahoo, and others to buy his company. Zuckerberg continually resisted their offers and realized that he did not want to sell the business. He said he was not growing Facebook solely for the money and that no amount of money would buy his business.3 What is most interesting is not whether Zuckerberg made a good decision or not but rather that such a young person (who was only in his early 20s) was so passionate about his business that he would not sell it for $1 billion, or $10 billion for that matter.4 Zuckerberg prefers to have tight creative and financial control of the business and wants to play the game his way.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

A second generation came out that produced much smoother and finer data. 9.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho8KVOe_y08 Chapter 14 1.   Apple famously fired Steve Jobs, and the whole Mac team quit. Then Apple almost died until he came back, and then it became the world’s most valuable company. This is why people like Mark Zuckerberg are shown such deference today. 2.   Patricof was one of the people who didn’t do well, ultimately, from VPL. I feel bad about it. What I hear is that he never invested in VR again. 3.   If it was ever true, it is no longer true today. Silicon Valley is now graced by some remarkably brilliant, decidedly non-asshole CEOs. 4.   


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

He agreed to set up and lead Facebook’s AI research laboratory in New York City. The move underscored the renewed corporate enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. The AI Winter was only the dimmest of memories. It was now clearly AI Spring. Facebook’s move to join the AI gold rush was an odd affair. It began with a visit by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook cofounder and chief executive, to an out-of-the-way technical conference called Neural Information Processing Systems, or NIPS, held in a Lake Tahoe hotel at the end of 2013. The meeting had long been a bone-dry academic event, but Zuckerberg’s appearance to answer questions was a clear bellwether.


pages: 288 words: 16,556

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The same would tend be true in any business organization. Fortunately, ever since fractional interests in corporations were developed, there has been a better way: allocate shares in the corporation, or bonuses or options paid in shares, to key people to reward them directly for bearing responsibility. Facebook was founded by Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg. According to recent news accounts Saverin currently owns only about 5% of the company, down from about 34%, while Zuckerberg’s share has fallen from 66% to 24%. Why did their ownership stakes both decrease? They did so because Saverin and Zuckerberg needed to bring in other investors to grow the company.


pages: 433 words: 125,031

Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil by Alex Cuadros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, BRICs, buy the rumour, sell the news, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, family office, financial engineering, high net worth, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, NetJets, offshore financial centre, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rent-seeking, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche

Before Microsoft or the Macintosh came Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. Before Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace. Before the iPhone, U.S. government agencies developed GPS, touch-screens, and voice recognition. Bill Gates himself recently noted that private companies could never have created the Internet. The main genius of Gates and Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg was to build teams, marshal resources, and streamline and mass-market the innovations of others. All three played key roles in the advancement of technology, but in none of these cases did the inventors reap the greatest rewards. It turns out that even some billionaires are skeptical of the contributions of their class.


pages: 420 words: 126,194

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, glass ceiling, high net worth, illegal immigration, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, open borders, post-industrial society, white flight

Such existential civilisational tiredness is not a uniquely modern European phenomenon, but the fact that a society should feel like it has run out of steam at precisely the moment when a new society has begun to move in cannot help but lead to vast, epochal changes. Had it been possible to discuss these matters some solution might have been reached. Yet even in 2015, at the height of the migration crisis, it was speech and thought that was constricted. At the peak of the crisis in September 2015 Chancellor Merkel of Germany asked the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, what could be done to stop European citizens writing criticisms of her migration policy on Facebook. ‘Are you working on this?’ she asked him. He assured her that he was.2 In fact the criticism, thought and discussion ought to have been boundless. Looking back, it is remarkable how restricted we made our discussion even whilst we opened our home to the world.


pages: 404 words: 124,705

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter by Susan Pinker

assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, facts on the ground, fixed-gear, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, indoor plumbing, intentional community, invisible hand, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, Occupy movement, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), place-making, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, tontine, Tony Hsieh, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Noticing the back-talking sixteen-year-old Neal steal a book with a racy cover from the school library, the teacher, Mildred Grady, used her own time and money to ensure there would always be a new novel by that author on the shelf, secretly stoking what became Neal’s lifelong reading habit.28 We may not pay them well or respect them as much as we do Internet barons like Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin. But if a gifted teacher can turn resistant kids into readers—if an excellent teacher can be parachuted into a class and learning and achievement spike as a result—then we should start investing at least as much in teachers’ wetware as we do in software and hardware. Principle 5 Make parent, teacher, and peer interaction the priority for preschoolers and young children.


Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

The term applies particularly to technology which is easy to use but whose workings are largely inaccessible to the user, as in computer-dominated automobiles whose innards are too complex for the ordinary driver to engage with: you use what you don’t understand.11 The programming guru Peter Merholz fleshes out this mindset by explaining how creators should relate to consumers; the designer should actively seek to hide the complexities of technology from its users. The former head of the Xerox PARC research centre John Seely Brown exhorts his colleagues to ‘get the technology out of the way’ in use and to make the experience seem ‘seamless’. The Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg converts this exhortation into a social formula, one embodied by the slogan ‘frictionless sharing’; his program is meant to diminish the hard, frustrating effort to make a friend or get a date. In all, friction-free becomes user-friendly when the user does not have to think about ‘why?’ The sting in the tail of this ethos is that the technology becomes difficult to scrutinize critically; the user knows whether the technology does what it says, but is prevented rather than assisted by experts from pondering why it does what it does.


pages: 592 words: 125,186

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It by Matthew Williams

3D printing, 4chan, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic bias, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, gamification, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, Oklahoma City bombing, OpenAI, Overton Window, power law, selection bias, Snapchat, statistical model, The Turner Diaries, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, white flight

The United Nations came to the conclusion that Facebook had a ‘determining role’ in stirring up hate against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar in the 2016–17 genocide.38 Eventually Facebook acknowledged its role and apologised, admitting to being too slow to address the hate speech posted on its platform in the region. Facebook now recognises that countries that are new to social media are most vulnerable to online disinformation and hate speech. The suspension of Donald Trump from their platform for praising those who violently stormed the US Capitol in his support may be a sign that Mark Zuckerberg now acknowledges that online hate can have physical consequences much closer to home. * The first two decades of the twenty-first century saw the far right attract an audience at a scale not seen since the Second World War. Extreme ideas that were considered unutterable in public a decade ago now flow unabated across our social media timelines.


pages: 518 words: 128,324

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Was he destined to one day become America’s national security adviser who, with Nixon, engineered the opening to China? Anyone harboring such a thought in 1940 or 1950 would have been out of his mind. So, too, with Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard after two years to pursue his passion for computing that became Microsoft. Or Mark Zuckerberg, an indifferent student who spent most of his time creating an online tool for dorm-mates to stay in touch that exploded to become Facebook. How should we understand these outcomes? The great Greek playwrights like Sophocles, whose tragedies dominated the literary landscape in ancient Greece, thought fate was the answer.


pages: 370 words: 129,096

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Others loathe him but remain oddly loyal out of respect for his drive and mission. What Musk has developed that so many of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley lack is a meaningful worldview. He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation. The life that Musk has created to manage all of these endeavors is preposterous. A typical week starts at his mansion in Bel Air. On Monday, he works the entire day at SpaceX.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

The Boston-based tech PE firm TA Associates had zero international staff a decade ago, but now half its employees and investments are outside the United States, especially from Mumbai to Hong Kong. Talent is also in ever greater circulation between the West and Asia and within the region itself. When Pavel Durov, often referred to as Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg, moved the communications app Telegram out of Russia, he shifted operations to Dubai and Singapore. The Singaporean Yinglan Tan, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon, was until recently the venture capital fund Sequoia Capital’s lead partner covering Southeast Asia and India before he left to launch his own frontier tech-focused fund called Insignia Venture Partners, for which he had more than $100 million in commitments within weeks.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

At the same time this illustrates the worry expressed in the early days of the Republic, concerning the excessive political influence of a large financial sector—and it illustrates a central theme of the final part of this book: if we are to achieve the necessary economic reforms, we need to reform our politics. CHAPTER 6 The Challenge of New Technologies Silicon Valley and the advances in technology associated with it have become symbolic of American innovation and entrepreneurship. Larger-than-life figures like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg brought products to consumers around the world—products that they love and which make it possible for us to connect better with each other. Intel has produced chips that make our products “think” faster—do calculations faster—than the best brains in the world. Artificial intelligence (AI) can now beat humans not only in simple games like chess, but in more complicated ones like Go, where the number of possible moves is greater than the atoms in the universe.1 Bill Gates, it would seem, illustrates the best of the American spirit—having accumulated an estimated $135 billion, he began giving massive amounts to charity, as he used his energies to fight diseases around the world and attempted to improve education in the United States.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

Tweets and check-in alerts percolated through the air like cricket chirps as the staff slowly recovered from the Foursquare-fueled night before. Being your own lead user is always hard work, but when your product gives you an easy way to find a place to drink and meet new people, it takes its toll. Surrounded by this fast-growing band of coders and designers, Crowley was well on his way to joining the ranks of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter, the princelings of the social web. On a screen mounted by the elevator, Foursquare’s torrent of check-ins unfolded in real time. An animated globe spun slowly, revealing hot spots of check-ins flaring up in a self-service census of the creative class. Berlin, Stockholm, and Amsterdam burned bright as smart young things and their smartphones set out for dinner, drinks, and dancing.


pages: 457 words: 128,838

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Silicon Valley investors started putting money into new exchanges and digital-wallet providers, and some prominent names declared themselves believers. Moneyed investors came, following in the footsteps of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—the twin brothers famous for their legal tussles with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—who had announced back in April that they had acquired a massive stock of bitcoin then worth $11 million. As bitcoin’s price began to rise, rise, and rise further, the twins’ investment started looking well timed indeed. Not even the dramatic October 2 news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had arrested Ross Ulbricht, the alleged Dread Pirate Roberts mastermind of the Silk Road site, and had seized 26,000 bitcoins, then worth $3.6 million, would pose much of a setback.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

Furthermore, other than the 1942 realization of nuclear power (long after the physics had been proven), since the late 1930s there has been no new great invention on the order of the computer, flight, or nylon clothing. A century ago there were many great inventions; there are very few now. In the United States people are offered innovations such as Mark Zuckerberg’s “Facebook credits,” invented in 2009 and defunct by 2013, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s promise of an inaugural private passenger trip around the moon and back on a “Big Falcon Rocket” in 2023. The responses of many are “Why?” and “Really?” In the United Kingdom, we are forced to celebrate Sir James Dyson’s hand dryer and Sir Richard Branson’s tilting trains, even though he and his Virgin company did not invent them: businesses invent brands now, not completely new machines.


pages: 476 words: 139,761

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis

active measures, Anton Chekhov, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, failed state, fake news, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Julian Assange, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, WikiLeaks

I own buildings all over the place, model agencies, the Miss Universe pageant, jetliners, golf courses, casinos, and private resorts like Mar-a-Lago, one of the most spectacular estates anywhere in the world.’ It didn’t matter that this account of himself was, as Trump’s biographer put it, ‘laced with a number of howlers’. Image was replacing deeds as the repository of identity. Mark Zuckerberg was putting the final touches to the online social network he would launch the following month. The Facebook age – in which you were whatever you said you were – was beginning. Still, Trump’s voiceover revealed that ‘it wasn’t always so easy’. There had been a time when he had been in ‘serious trouble’.


pages: 445 words: 135,648

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno by Nancy Jo Sales

Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital divide, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, global pandemic, helicopter parent, Jaron Lanier, Jeffrey Epstein, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, post-work, Robert Durst, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TikTok, women in the workforce, young professional

On the contrary, people change their attitudes to match their behaviors. In this model, we are more like machines than thinking, autonomous beings. Or at least we can be made to work that way. So how do these companies succeed in manipulating us? Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook, confessed in an interview in 2017 that he and Mark Zuckerberg and other creators of social media had knowingly “exploited a vulnerability in human psychology” with the “social validation feedback loop” of “dopamine hits” and “likes.” “When Facebook was getting going,” Parker said, “I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, ‘I’m not on social media.’


pages: 689 words: 134,457

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

At Aspen, and its Swiss cousin, the World Economic Forum in Davos, an invitation validates your importance, a recognition that you have something wise to say, that you belong in the company of the wealthy and the powerful. Vitally important issues get aired here in courteous panel discussions often moderated by prominent journalists who treasure the spotlight. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg spoke there in 2019 to an audience free from hecklers accusing him of undermining democracy. The year Zuckerberg spoke, attendees were treated to an event by the rapper Common, who wore a white T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Let Love Have the Last Word.” The Aspen Ideas Festival is partly underwritten by Paul E.


pages: 521 words: 136,802

Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B Stewart, Rachel Abrams

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, estate planning, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Michael Milken, power law, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, éminence grise

But the court hadn’t set a trial date until October—far too late to offer Dauman any immediate protection. * * * — Shari was nervous about the prospect of that year’s Allen & Company media summit, which was held every year in Sun Valley, Idaho, and informally known as the “billionaires’ summer camp.” With participants Justin Trudeau, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Warren Buffett on the guest list, it would have been intimidating under any circumstances, especially since she was one of just a handful of women who weren’t attending as “significant others.” As usual, she’d be traveling alone. Adding to her anxiety: both Moonves and Dauman were supposed to be there.


pages: 535 words: 158,863

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

How it does this differs from story to story, across the many varied enterprises made possible by the Web, from a traditional selling platform like Amazon.com to something palpably new, like a social-networking site. Elly Page has been the research director for this book, and in 2004, while still a student at Harvard, she witnessed one such revolution as her classmate Mark Zuckerberg presided over the inception of the website Facebook. “At the time, the phrase ‘social networking’ had barely even entered the lexicon,” she recalled, “so it wasn’t immediately obvious what the site was for. Any Harvard undergrad could post a profile—a page with their name, dorm, extracurricular activities, interests, and so on—and then they could do what every nerd who suffered socially in high school dreams of—they could link up with ‘friends’ to show everyone how popular they were.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Paul Krugman points out that ‘very few of the top 1 percent, or even the top 0.01 percent, made their money that way. For the most part, we’re looking at executives at firms that they didn’t themselves create. They may own a lot of stock or stock options in their companies, but they received those assets as part of their pay package, not by founding the business.’148 So Jobs, Dyson or indeed Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook are exceptional as regards their role in developing brilliant new products that have benefitted millions, but they are not representative of the super-rich, even though they are useful poster boys for them. But we still need to ask questions: first, how much would they have got if they hadn’t owned (much of) their firms?


pages: 525 words: 142,027

CIOs at Work by Ed Yourdon

8-hour work day, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, distributed generation, Donald Knuth, fail fast, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Googley, Grace Hopper, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, Julian Assange, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Zipcar

Yourdon: Well, it’s interesting how few people have said, “Well, yes, at a certain point I had to go get my MBA” or “They sent me off to learn about finance and accounting and so forth.” There has been a lot of emphasis on broad education at an early stage, but after that, it seems to be very much on-the-job training, as you rise up through the ranks. Sridhara: Mark Zuckerberg didn’t go to school to learn how to build Facebook. So the answer to this is, I think for all of us, especially for me, learning is big every day. I come in to work every day to keep learning. So it’s a daily and a career aspiration. To learn literally every day and every year, to take on responsibilities that help you learn, grow, refine.


pages: 500 words: 146,240

Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, Peter Molyneux

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, book value, collective bargaining, Colossal Cave Adventure, do what you love, financial engineering, game design, Golden age of television, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index card, Mark Zuckerberg, oil shock, pirate software, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, Steve Jobs, Von Neumann architecture

She was making a fortune—literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year—and there I was trying to convince her, “But wouldn’t you like to make more? Wouldn’t you like to not be paid by the hour?” I pulled out every trick I could think of because I honestly didn’t think I would be successful without her. I was an artist, so I was still an asshole. I’m not saying that I was early Steve Jobs, early Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. But you’ve got to be an asshole to just have your dream, be a dick and ignore everyone, and pursue it. Later, you might grow up and realize what an asshole you were. I wasn’t an exception. So, Sherry loved movies, and there I was trying to show her Sonic the Hedgehog and why we should start a game company.


pages: 519 words: 155,332

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

The founders insisted on public offerings that featured two classes of stock—one for the founders, and one for the public. The founders’ shares would have the majority of votes, ensuring that while the public could bet on the success of the company, there would be no democracy when it came to defining or pursuing that success. “If Facebook hadn’t had a different class of stock for [founder Mark] Zuckerberg, it might well have been taken over soon after it went public because of the costly shift he made early on to mobile,” explained Barton, referring to the social network’s expensive but stunningly successful investment in creating a platform for ads on mobile devices. Establishing dual classes of stock is not new.


pages: 548 words: 147,919

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, big-box store, clean water, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, different worldview, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, technological determinism, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, unemployed young men, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Several other significant shifts occurred between 2005 and 2007: Rumsfeld signaled his newfound commitment to “stability operations” by signing DoD Directive 3000.05; the Defense Department created a new Africa Command, which was expressly designed to conduct stability operations and Phase Zero operations in Africa; and the military developed a renewed interest in counterinsurgency methods, manifested in the much-heralded 2007 Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual, and exemplified by post-2006 operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Dying Squirrel “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is said to have once remarked.6 For most Americans occupying the Now-Now-Now! world of Facebook, this probably feels apt. And until a decade ago, Zuckerberg’s statement might equally have applied to Pentagon strategists. A 1995 DoD strategy document was hardly less blunt than Zuckerberg: “Ultimately we see very little traditional strategic interest in Africa.”7 For the military, that began to change in 1998, when U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania were bombed by al Qaeda.


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Victorian British inventors lived under a regime that spent a large proportion of its outgoings on interest payments, in effect sending a signal that the safest thing for rich folk to do with their money was to collect rent on it from taxes on trade. Today, plenty of money is wasted on research that does not develop, and plenty of discoveries are made without the application of much money. When Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook in 2004 as a Harvard student, he needed very little R&D expenditure. Even when expanding it into a business, his first investment of $500,000 from Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal, was tiny compared with what entrepreneurs needed in the age of steam or railways. Intellectual property?


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Writing on the MIT Technology Review website, Sunil Paul and Nick Allen, two young venture capitalists, describe the Cleanweb vision: We believe the next opportunity is what we call the “cleanweb”—a form of clean tech that takes advantage of the Internet, social media, and mobile communications to alter how we consume resources, relate to the world, interact with each other, and pursue economic growth.28 The Cleanweb Movement, also called energy IT or clean IT, is likely going to drive the paradigm change with lightning speed, leaving conventional business practices at the side of the road, with business leaders wondering how they failed to pick up on the cues—just as was the case when the Internet generation began to create applications and employ social media to share music, videos, news, and information, leaving much of the media and entertainment industries in the dust. To understand the speed at which this change is going to take place, we need to step back for a moment and look at Zuckerberg’s law, named after Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Zuckerberg has discovered an exponential curve in social media, not unlike Moore’s discovery in computing power and Swanson’s discovery in solar technology. Using data assembled internally on Facebook, Zuckerburg shows that the amount of information shared on the Web has been doubling every year and he predicts that the doubling process will continue for the foreseeable future.


pages: 543 words: 153,550

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Continuing with that same logic, we can infer that a one-day event to spur interest in education may lack meaningful impact. Volunteers coming into a community and cleaning up a park may produce few long-term benefits. Any one-time influx of money, regardless of its size, will dissipate in its effect unless it changes transition probabilities. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to the Newark, New Jersey, public schools, an amount that was matched by other donors. That one-shot donation, which amounted to approximately $6,000 per student, has produced few measurable effects on test scores.14 Markov models guide action by distinguishing between policies that change transition probabilities, which can have long-term effects, and those change the state and can only have short-term effects.


pages: 513 words: 152,381

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

“Astrophysical Ionizing Radiation and Earth: A Brief Review and Census of Intermittent Intense Sources.” Astrobiology, 11(4), 343–61. Menzel, P. T. (2011). “Should the Value of Future Health Benefits Be Time-Discounted?” in Prevention vs. Treatment: What’s the Right Balance? (pp. 246–73). Oxford University Press. Metz, C. (June 9, 2018). “Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the Feud Over Killer Robots.” The New York Times. Milanovic, B. (2016). Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization. Harvard University Press. Minsky, M. (1984). Afterword, in True Names. Bluejay Books. Mnih, V., et al. (2015). “Human-Level Control through Deep Reinforcement Learning.”


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Bill Easterly, not very charitably perhaps, but quite accurately, described their conclusion: “After two years of work by the commission of 21 world leaders and experts, an 11-member working group, 300 academic experts, 12 workshops, 13 consultations, and a budget of $4m, the experts’ answer to the question of how to attain high growth was roughly: we do not know, but trust experts to figure it out.”83 ENGINEERING MIRACLES? The young social entrepreneurs basking in Silicon Valley’s enthusiastic glow have probably not read the Spence report. According to them, we do know what will get the developing world to grow—they just need to adopt the latest technologies, chief among them the internet. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, is a strong proponent that internet connectivity will have a huge positive impact, a sentiment echoed in a hundred reports and position papers. One report from Dalberg (a consulting firm) tells us that “the internet is a tremendous, undisputed force for economic growth and social change [italics added]” in Africa.84 The fact is evidently so obvious that the report does not bother to cite much solid evidence, which is sensible since there is no such evidence to cite.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Greenspan and Wooldridge, Capitalism in America: A History, op. cit. 15. Adam Pothitos, “The history of the smartphone”, Mobile Industry Review, October 31st 2016 16. Tuan Nguyen, “The history of smartphones”, ThoughtCo., https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-smartphones-4096585 17. Adam Gale, “Will Mark Zuckerberg’s mobile-first strategy make Facebook bigger than Google?”, Management Today, July 28th 2016 18. Robert J. Gordon, “The demise of US economic growth: restatement, rebuttal, and reflections”, NBER working paper 19895 19. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, op. cit. 20. Amie Gordon and Tom Rawstorne, “Traffic is slower than a horse drawn carriage”, Daily Mail, October 16th 2016 21.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

“Yes,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2016, “some people will idle away their lives under my UBI plan. The question isn’t whether a UBI will discourage work, but whether it will make the existing problem significantly worse.” The approval of people on the right, and of tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, does not make universal basic income a better idea, just a somewhat more politically plausible one. *1 During the panel discussion, Norm Pearlstine of Time Inc.—who now runs the freshly unionized Los Angeles Times—said he wasn’t too worried by the Internet: “I don’t think long-form journalism is much threatened,” he said


How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life by Ian Dunt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, bounce rate, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, classic study, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, fake news, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, invisible hand, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, zero-sum game

But it was only in the mid-2000s that it became clear how fundamentally the web would change politics. The key development was called Web 2.0. Instead of just reading content, users would be able to generate it themselves. The social networking site Facebook went online in 2004. At first it was only available in Harvard, where its founder Mark Zuckerberg was studying, but by 2006, it was open to anyone over 13 years old. It now has 2.6 billion active users. Facebook also owns the WhatsApp messaging service, with two billion users, Facebook Messenger, with 1.3 billion users, and the photo-sharing app Instagram, with over one billion users. Twitter went online in 2006, with a single message: ‘just setting up my twttr’ – from Jack Dorsey, a New York University undergraduate.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

What if some combination of AI, robots, and autonomous vehicles actually means not just job disruption, but less demand for human workers in the private economy? What would our economic model be in an economy where there is no need for millions to work at all? Some, from presidential candidate Andrew Yang to Silicon Valley icons like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to former head of the SEIU Andy Stern, think this is a primary virtue of a universal basic income (UBI). If unprecedented technological advances make us wealthier, more productive, and less in need of workers, we need a different model of income support. But hold it. Even if it did come to pass that the private sector demands less labor, does that lead to “end of work” scenarios with massive job shortages?


pages: 529 words: 150,263

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, biofilm, Black Swan, Boeing 747, clean water, coronavirus, disinformation, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, indoor plumbing, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, moral panic, Pearl River Delta, Ronald Reagan, Skype, the built environment, the long tail, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Concerned that an unanticipated infectious disease outbreak due to bioterrorism or a natural event could kill some 30 million people at some point in the next decade, Bill Gates is also stepping up efforts to improve the surveillance of EIDs and responses to epidemics through the work of his charitable foundation. And in 2017 Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, added their considerable wealth to these efforts, joining with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies in an initiative called Resolve. Headed by former CDC director Tom Frieden, Resolve’s ambition is to save 100 million lives globally by investing in the prevention of cardiovascular disease and giving countries the ability to respond to outbreaks of Ebola and other emerging viruses more quickly.


pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

Forbes reported that Theodore Geisel is the eighth-highest-earning deceased celebrity with earnings of $16 million in 2017 after Prince (7), Tom Petty (6), Bob Marley (5), Elvis Presley (4), Charles Schulz (3), Arnold Palmer (2), and Michael Jackson (1). 48 Where are the other great, living philanthropists besides Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffett? And now John Cauldwell. Pitchforks to the ready. Relative things matter. The left-behinds who struggled noticed the elites were doing fine. Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2017) argued that “an economy that fails to deliver growth for half of its population for an entire generation is bound to generate discontent with the status quo and a rejection of establishment politics.”


pages: 487 words: 147,238

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce

The site grew out of an argument the two were having about whether a certain woman was attractive, or “hot.” Hong and Young created a way for strangers to look at a picture of a woman’s face and vote on how she measured up. The idea was also the basis of Facemash, the precursor to Facebook, a campus rating site created by Mark Zuckerberg in 2003, when he was still a Harvard sophomore. Two of the founders of YouTube, guy Silicon Valley software engineers who met at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, have said that Hot or Not was the inspiration for what they originally thought would be just a video version of the game, as well.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

This rapid adoption is increasingly typical of new technology: More than forty years passed between the invention of electricity and the moment it reached a quarter of the U.S. population, and that lag has been shrinking ever since, to thirty years for radio, fifteen years for the PC, seven years for the World Wide Web, and just three years for Facebook. That is why Mark Zuckerberg, character flaws and all, is a popular icon and the subject of a full-length Hollywood feature film about his life. According to a 2011 study by Facebook, the theory that there are only “six degrees of separation” between any two people on earth no longer holds. Now, owing to social media, there are only 4.7 degrees of separation, and for that many Americans thank their Internet billionaires.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Instead, many of the individuals at the top of the wealth distribution are, in one way or another, geniuses at business. Some might claim, for instance, that Steve Jobs or the innovators of search engines or social media were, in their way, geniuses. Jobs was number 110 on the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest billionaires before his death, and Mark Zuckerberg was 52. But many of these “geniuses” built their business empires on the shoulders of giants, such as Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, who has never appeared on the Forbes list. Berners-Lee could have become a billionaire but chose not to—he made his idea available freely, which greatly speeded up the development of the Internet.18 A closer look at the successes of those at the top of the wealth distribution shows that more than a small part of their genius resides in devising better ways of exploiting market power and other market imperfections—and, in many cases, finding better ways of ensuring that politics works for them rather than for society more generally.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

In short, philanthropy among most Americans has fallen steadily since the mid-1960s, only partially and temporarily offset by megagifts from the newly mega-rich.91 This is exactly what happened in the previous Gilded Age, as Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and some of their peers, immensely rich as a by-product of the massive increase in inequality, doled out megagifts. It may seem hard to be critical of the generosity of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Mark Zuckerberg, but their personal charity shouldn’t conceal the metastasizing self-centeredness among middle-class Americans since the peak of our generosity in the 1960s.92 WORKER SOLIDARITY In Chapter 2 on economic inequality we discussed in detail the rise of labor unions as economic institutions in the first half of the twentieth century and their collapse after 1960.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

In 2001, the company purchased stolen PayPal accounts outright, simply to reverse engineer the fraud and better understand their opponents. The team’s fraud-fighting success earned its members recognition. Levchin notched a place on the 2002 prestigious, peer-reviewed “Innovators Under 35” list, compiled annually by the MIT Technology Review. Other honorees over the years have included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Linux founder Linus Torvalds. For Levchin and Frezza’s efforts on IGOR, they earned US Patent US7249094B2: a “system and method for depicting on-line transactions.” Frezza was awarded the patent posthumously. On December 18, 2001, three days after his final exams and just three weeks shy of his twenty-second birthday, Robert Frezza passed away following heart failure.


pages: 568 words: 164,014

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

We suspect that this shift in operations reflects the influence of ongoing military reforms, widespread exposure of Chinese cyber operations, and actions taken by the U.S. government,” the cybersecurity firm FireEye concluded in one report.5 In December 2014, even as inside government we were struggling to respond to the Sony attack, China’s head internet official, Lu Wei, had come to the United States. During his visit, he had received a personal tour from Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook’s headquarters and had met with Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook—meetings that publicly had them all smiling, given the business opportunity Lu, the gatekeeper to the Chinese internet, offered. But he also had tense meetings in Washington with officials from the National Security Council.6 In a public address at George Washington University, Lu offered that he felt China and the United States had become “one community of common interest” when it came to internet policy and that they should follow “common rules.”


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Irwin: The Cell Phone Guy It was wonderful for consumers for all these networking breakthroughs to occur, but someone had to pack them into a phone you could carry in your pocket to get the full frontal revolution—and no individual was more responsible for this mobile phone revolution than Irwin Jacobs. In the pantheon of the great innovators who launched the Internet age—Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Andy Grove, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg—save a few lines for Irwin Jacobs, and add Qualcomm to the list of important companies you’ve barely heard of. Qualcomm is to mobile phones what Intel and Microsoft together were to desktops and laptops—the primary inventor, designer, and manufacturer of the microchips and software that run handheld smartphones and tablets.


pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

The gap that I identified was not understanding that the brain matters, but identifying the brain as the primary entry point to everything in existence we care about. Then through that frame, creating the tools to read and write neural code. To read and write human. I started Kernel, and then less than a year later both Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg did similar things. Elon started a company that was roughly in a similar vein as mine, a similar trajectory of trying to figure out how to re-write human to play well with AI, and then Facebook decided to do theirs focused on further engagement with their users within the Facebook experience.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

However, for industries facing Knightian uncertainty—for example, industries using completely new and unproven technologies—there’s no easy way to commoditize the business since, by definition, the randomness can’t be quantified. These unknown unknowns make most of us withdraw from the game. But these are also the circumstances in which billionaires are made. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook come to mind. What were the odds that social media would be a commercial success in the pre-Facebook days? How would you have estimated such odds without any prior history or data? Human nature simply doesn’t allow us to view uncertainty with indifference. Fortune favors the brave, and market prices reflect our innate tendency to avoid uncertainty.


pages: 598 words: 183,531

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition by Steven Levy

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, corporate governance, Donald Knuth, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, game design, Gary Kildall, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, Haight Ashbury, John Conway, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, Multics, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, popular electronics, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, software patent, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, value engineering, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

A sailing enthusiast, he’s written three books on his cruising adventures, and Roberta is working on a nonfiction novel about the Irish immigration.) A new generation of hackers has emerged, techies who don’t see business as an enemy but the means through which their ideas and innovations can find the broadest audience. Take Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has drawn four hundred million users to share their personal lives online. At twenty-five, he has proven a master at the black art of business development—deliberately and purposefully opening his site to advertisers and marketers. Yet he clearly thinks of himself as a hacker; last year, he told the audience at an event for would-be Internet entrepreneurs that “We’ve got this whole ethos that we want to build a hacker culture.”


Lonely Planet Kenya by Lonely Planet

affirmative action, Airbnb, Beryl Markham, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, DIY culture, Kibera, land reform, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, out of africa, place-making, spice trade, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Milimani & Upper Hill oMama OliechKENYAN$$ ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %0723925604; Marcus Garvey Rd; mains KSh700-1350; h11am-11.30pm) Fish dominates the menu here: the whole fried tilapia from Lake Nakuru is the signature dish, especially when ordered with ugali and kachumbari (tomato-and-onion salsa). Wildly popular, the restaurant is considered one of Nairobi's best – the sort of place that locals take first-time visitors to the city (like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2016). oRoadhouse GrillBARBECUE$$ ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %0720768663; www.facebook.com/RoadhouseGrillNairobi; Dennis Pritt Rd, Hurlingham; mains from KSh600; h11am-6am Mon-Sat, to midnight Sun) Out beyond Milimani in the west, Roadhouse Grill is widely touted by locals as the best place for nyama choma (barbecued meat).


pages: 676 words: 203,386

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific by David Bianculli

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, fake news, feminist movement, friendly fire, global village, Golden age of television, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, period drama, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship

In between, for Spacey, was a long string of successes in film and the theater, including winning a Tony for Lost in Yonkers in 1991 and Oscars for both Best Supporting Actor (The Usual Suspects, 1996) and Best Actor (American Beauty, 2000). How he came to do House of Cards, and how House of Cards came to Netflix, say volumes about how much television has changed, in both content and delivery, since Spacey guest starred on Wiseguy. Spacey says he was on the set of The Social Network, the 2010 movie about Mark Zuckerberg and the origins of Facebook, adapted by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher. Spacey was the film’s executive producer and began chatting with Fincher about doing something together. They’d both been offered a lot of television by that time and turned it down, but Fincher said he’d noticed the rights to this British series, House of Cards, had just become available.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

He made money with a bunch of side ventures, including salvaging some of the company’s discarded equipment, and then launched a service that allowed people to dictate important letters to call centers for overnight delivery. It was successful, but in what became a pattern, von Meister was forced out for spending wildly and not paying any attention to operations.38 Von Meister was one of the original breed of media entrepreneurs—think Ted Turner rather than Mark Zuckerberg—who lived larger than life and mixed craziness with shrewdness so thoroughly that they became almost indistinguishable. He had a taste for flashy women and fine red wine, race cars and private planes, single-malt Scotch and contraband cigars. “Bill von Meister was not just a serial entrepreneur, he was a pathological entrepreneur,” according to Michael Schrage, who covered him for the Washington Post.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

You may agree or disagree with that as a mission statement, but it was a problem that was not going to be solved outside of SpaceX. All of the people working there knew that, and it motivated them tremendously.” TF: Peter has written elsewhere, “The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.” ✸ How would you reply to someone who says that your position on college and higher education is hypocritical since you, yourself, went to Stanford for both undergraduate and law school? [Context: Many people see Peter as “anti-college” due to his Thiel Fellowship, which “gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.”]


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

From a modern perspective, he sometimes seems like a Silicon Valley visionary who was born a half century too soon, and he served as a key prototype for a myth that had yet to be named: the start-up founder. Like many of his successors, he benefited from a privileged background, which allowed him to take repeated risks without falling out of the upper class. Long before the fictionalized version of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Fuller brooded over his failure to join Harvard University’s exclusive final clubs, and his departure from college allowed him—like many Ivy League dropouts—to define himself as a rebel. In 1927 Fuller underwent what he described afterward as a mystical experience, inspiring him to address the problem of housing.


pages: 394 words: 110,352

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation by Jono Bacon

barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), collaborative editing, crowdsourcing, Debian, DevOps, digital divide, digital rights, do what you love, do-ocracy, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, Guido van Rossum, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, openstreetmap, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, software as a service, Stephen Fry, telemarketer, the long tail, union organizing, VA Linux, web application

It works a lot like Twitter, but its main selling point is that it is open source code and encourages other companies to set up other sites running the same software. Identi.ca is popular among proponents of Free Software and open culture. As a start to its goal of open data sharing, it lets you set up an automatic feed so that your postings to identi.ca get reposted immediately to Twitter. Facebook Back in October 2003, a young Mark Zuckerberg, who is now known as the baby-faced founder of Facebook, wrote Facemash while at Harvard University. Although the site was initially a hot-or-not type of voting site where you could rate things as being hot or not, Zuckerberg expanded it and created a social study tool for his art history project.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

It has nothing about it of the modern, which is the sense of “capitalist society” that Walzer wants. Unusual profit awaits anyone at any time in history, such as “Yond Cassius [with] a lean and hungry look. / He thinks too much,” who finds the ideas first and is courageous enough to invest in them—Mark Zuckerberg (and roommates) find Facebook, Henry Ford finds cheap cars, Andrew Carnegie finds cheap steel. As Luigi Einaudi wrote in 1943, summarizing the analysis in 1730–1734 of the Irish/French Richard Cantillon of the word “entrepreneur,” what distinguishes the imprenditore, the entrepreneur, is not possessing and accumulating capital at a fixed interest rate, but “assuming the risk of acquiring the factors of production [such as land and labor and capital itself] at the price on the market . . . and of selling their product at an uncertain price.”5 Buy ideas low and hope that you can sell them high.


Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The Grid It's easy finding sights along the Grid, but everything is spread out. oCalifornia MuseumMUSEUM ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %916-653-0650; www.californiamuseum.org; 1020 O St; adult/child $9/6.50; h10am-5pm Tue-Sat, from noon Sun; c) This modern museum is home to the California Hall of Fame and so the only place to simultaneously encounter César Chávez, Mark Zuckerberg and Amelia Earhart. The California Indians exhibit is a highlight, with artifacts and oral histories of more than 10 tribes. oCalifornia State CapitolHISTORIC BUILDING ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %916-324-0333; http://capitolmuseum.ca.gov; 1315 10th St; h8am-5pm Mon-Fri, from 9am Sat & Sun; c)F The gleaming dome of the California State Capitol is Sacramento’s most recognizable structure.